Flip Ultra HD

We've had this long enough now to finally give it a review.  We bought this camera under the premise that Karen would need it to record her Sign Language assignments to send to her teachers.  At least that's how I tricked her into letting me spend money on a new gadget.  We had an older digital video camera that works fine and really would do the things that she needed to do but it takes DV tapes and is harder to download clips from as it's older and doesn't take advantage of some of the newer formats that compress and make usable the video that we took.  Well I reviewed just about every flash memory based video recorder and looked at user feedback and about a million other criteria.  In the end I took Glenn Beck's advise and got a Flip.  (As a general rule you can't go too far wrong if you take Glenn's advice) So they had a great price running on Amazon.com and it was coming up on Christmas and I didn't want to pay for shipping so we ordered one using the Super Saver Shipping, which if you've shopped Amazon you know can take some time in getting to you.  In the mean time we took advantage of a slightly higher price at Wal-Mart so we could have it for Christmas Day (which I had to work at 5:45am) and record the kids opening their Christmas stuff.  When I came home I viewed the video Karen had taken and was disappointed.  The lighting made everything a little grainy and I really wasn't all that impressed with the image quality.  It records in 720p HD format and I expected this to be at least as good as the broadcast HD we get on our 720p TV.  It wasn't.  Having purchased the camera from Amazon already and needing to take the Wal-Mart one back to Wal-Mart I was a little discouraged.  Granted the image quality was better than the images that our old DV camcorder took it just wasn't all that I expected.  I wasn't happy with the 2X zoom because it's only really effective indoors and I was still a bit bummed about the grainy look of images in artificial light.  I was pretty much stuck though.  We couldn't justify trying a half dozen models and taking them each back to try another one so I was waiting for a camera that was marginally better than the one we already had and no real prospect of getting anything better.  Well a week or two later our Flip Ultra HD showed up with it's accessories (HDMI cables) and I was excited but only a little.  It wasn't until our awesome weekend up at the Gorge that I finally fell in love with our Flip.  In the sunlight this thing shines.  We took video of us climbing up a cliff, rocks and rolling down sand dunes.  We ran out of batteries a little earlier than I would have liked but in general it performed as well as I could have asked given the limitations of size and the fact that it uses 2 AA batteries I couldn't have asked for more.  All of the things I said before about the grainy look when shooting inside are still mostly true (if the light is more white than yellow things come out pretty good) but the video outside is as good looking as what we got on our little day trip then it was money well spent.  I've got a little look at it just below this blog.  If you want to see a version in it's original form let me know and I can send you a clip.  In the meantime try not to fall out of your chair watching this clip.