Amazon.com: Flip UltraHD Video Camera - Black, 8 GB, 2 Hours (3rd Generation) NEWEST MODEL: Camera & Photo

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3.8 out of 5 stars (460 customer reviews)

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1,269 of 1,306 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Best Flip once again so far...., September 22, 2010

N. Farrell "Long Time Flip Camera User" (Syracuse, New York USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Flip UltraHD Video Camera - Black, 8 GB, 2 Hours (3rd Generation) NEWEST MODEL (Camera)

This review is very similar to the review that I gave for the Flip Slid HD when it first came out. (Please see that review also...)

I have been a Flip camera user since they released the first gen. Flip Mino HD (not the new metallic model). I loved the camera. For what I needed it for it was everything I wanted. I soon became addicted to the Flip cameras and needed to purchase the newest one every time they came out.

I currently own the Flip Mino HD (1st gen) Flip Ultra HD (2nd Gen) Flip Slide HD, and now the Flip Ultra HD (3rd Gen with Flip Port). I also own a Canon GL2 and Vixia 30 video cameras and a Canon Xi digital SLR.

I got home from school on Tuesday and found my brand new Flip Ultra HD waiting for me. I had about 20 minutes to open the package, look and set up the features (time, date, etc.) before I had to leave for marching band rehearsal. During rehearsal I did some test shooting and I was very impressed with the quality of this camera, but I was worried about a few features.

I was reluctant at first to purchase this camera because of the 60fps feature. I did own a Kodak Zi8 and the 720p 60fps setting didn't not import into Final Cut Pro. I had to take it into compressor or some other software and change the file extension in order for Final Cut Pro to import it. Of course this causes a decrease in quality.

I was also reluctant because of the image stabilization feature. When image stabilization is added to a camera (of this size) video quality usually suffers. I know flips can be very shaky if you do not have a well trained hand. After a few hours a playing you will figure out the right movements that the camera can incorporate so your video will not come out shaky.

I don't use my Flip Slide HD because of the omni directional microphone. I can not record loud situations because the microphone distorts. This is my biggest fault with the Slide HD. I was a little concerned with the new Flip Ultra HD that it would have the same problem even though it uses a different microphone, but what really sold me on this new Flip was the accessories and the FLIP PORT.

Right off the bat I noticed all of the new accessories that they are pushing for the Flips, the aquapacks, the igo chargers, and my favorite is the magnetic Bower Wide Angel Lens. Flip and Cisco have finally started listening to its customers, but what put it over the top for me was Blue Microphones. Blue Microphones makes vintage and out of this world recording, studio, usb microphones. I own one of their USB Microphones called the Snow Ball and the quality of that microphone is amazing. When I found out that Blue Microphones was making a microphone (mikey) for the new Flip to be used with the new Flip Port, I purchased mine right away.

So the Review...

The Ultra HD has always been my favorite because of its size. I think the bigger it is the better control you will have and the less shaky video you will produce. The new Ultra HD is smaller, but not that much. It feels good in your hands. The controls and the screen are in the same place. It is a nice fit in your hand.

I was very shocked at how well the image stabilization worked. If you have used a flip before this one you know that the slightest movement will create shaky video. You can tell that this one has image stabilization. It still can produce shaky video but it might take a big jolt to do it.

The 60 fps was great. It was much clearer video and with the image stabilization it made everything much smoother and clearer in the view finder, even in low light situations. I did check when I got home and the 60fps does import right into Final Cut Pro for editing without any compression. (Probably cause the videos are in MP4 format)

Overall I think this is the best Flip Camera out on the market. I like this one better than the Mino because of the touch screen controls. Sometimes pressing the touch screen controls on the Mino will cause the camera to shake.

I hope this review was helpful. Please feel free to leave comments or questions.

See my comparison of my Flip Cameras below.

Flip Mino HD - Good Microphone (2nd out of all of them), doesn't have as wide as a shooting angle as the Ultra's. Very small in the hand, at times hard to control.

Flip Ultra HD (2nd Gen) - Good Microphone (3rd out of all of them) Wide Angle for shooting, Feels good in the hand, sturdy, wont break if dropped. Double A batteries only last a few hours, rechargeable battery pack has short life span. Unit can get hot when charging - may even shut down.

Flip Slide HD - Poor Microphone (in loud situations) - its omni directional so it picks up all around the Flip not just in the front like the others. (4th out of all of them) Touch controls are better than the Flip Mino, however this has no hard buttons. The Slide does have the largest storage capacity and is second in video quality only to the new Flip Ultra HD.

Flip Ultra HD (3rd Gen Flip Port) - Widest Angle for shooting, feels the best in the hand, has the Best Microphone and currently I believe has the best video quality. This also is the only unit that has the new Flip Port.

Thanks

Nick

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250 of 260 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Basic Camera, somewhat lacking features for power users, November 7, 2010

T. Simons (Columbia, SC United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Flip UltraHD Video Camera - Black, 8 GB, 2 Hours (3rd Generation) NEWEST MODEL (Camera)

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Length:: 1:42 Mins

This is a powerful, easy-to-use, fairly cheap video camera; it records @ 1280 x 720, 60 FPS, and can hold about two full hours of video at that capacity. It fits neatly in a shirt pocket and is pretty much ideal for recording anything that doesn't need to be professionally produced film, from home movies to recording interviews. It comes packaged with a basic editing program that's designed to make it as easy as possible to produce basic home movies and post them to the web.

So far as that goes, it's a great camera, especially at the price. The only real problem with it is that the overall interface is fairly dumbed down -- for the sake of ease of use, they've traded away a *lot* of functionality. For example, it's easy to view the clips you've just recorded in the viewfinder, but you can't "fast forward" or "rewind" to a specific frame when you're not actively playing back videos, because there's only one set of "forward" and "reverse" buttons, and they also fill the "skip to next/previous clip" functions.

Similarly, the editing software is clean and easy to use, but lacks a lot of options. It's fairly easy to take a chunk of video, yank out a selection of favorite clips, and string them together into a movie, and maybe even put a title on the front and credits at the end, but anything more complicated than that ain't happening without third-party editing software. Perhaps most critical is the lack of a "resize" feature -- because this camera records at such a high resolution, even fairly short videos taken with it can quickly reach prohibitively high file sizes (two minutes of video from this camera took me approximately two hours to upload to YouTube, over a DSL connection).

All that's an issue because it seems, to me at least, that the only reason to purchase a dedicated video camera, in an era when everyone and their brother's cellphone already has video recording capability, is if you're at minimum a dedicated hobbyist. And if you're such a dedicated hobbyist, I would suspect that you'd want more bells and whistles (like focus and exposure controls, or better bundled editing software) than this thing has. What it does, it does great, I'm just having a hard time figuring out who the expected market is for this -- it records in higher resolution and better FPS than anyone who wants a casual camera for posting web videos really needs, and it lacks the advanced features that would make it appealing to dedicated hobbyists. The two-hour recording time and easy portability might make it very useful for people who want to record interviews or meetings, but archiving those recordings would be prohibitively difficult without, again, 3rd-party editing tools, due to the massive file size of the recordings this thing generates. The camera's best feature is probably the image stabilization, which works very well -- indeed, so well that I forgot about it, and just waved the camera around without even worrying about image shake at all. Because of that, this camera might be ideal for hobbyists who already have a full suite of editing software and are looking to shoot in uncontrolled conditions without a tripod.

The video to the left is an example of the sort of thing it's fairly easy to turn out with this camera -- you can see how it deals fairly well with indoor lighting conditions, has good color, etc., and you can see the "image stabilization" at work. I should note, however, that I did make two changes to this video using third-party software -- I reduced its resolution from 1280 x 720 to 640 x 360 and converted it to a .wmv file so that it would fit within Amazon's file size & format requirements for video reviews.

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EDIT: It's unfortunate that CISCO is terminating the Flip line, as I just finally discovered what this camera *is* perfect for: taking on vacations in foreign countries. I just returned from a trip to New Zealand, and this camera's high FPS recording rate made it ideal for capturing footage of wilderness, animals and birds that move quickly and are otherwise hard to photograph, and the like; it was easy to just take a half-second or so of video whenever I wanted a still photograph, and pull those frames out later with the Flip's software; it was easy and convenient to carry wherever I went, even along full-day hiking trails; and the camera's two-hour recording time was sufficient to hold all the video I took over the two weeks of the vacation. The lack of focus & exposure controls was still a minor issue -- sometimes it had trouble with varied lighting in panorama shots and so forth -- but the camera's automated adjustments were pretty good if not perfect, and I was able to grab a great deal of quality footage of my trip.

There was one minor issue with charging the camera's battery -- the battery life, at about a half hour to 45 minutes, is significantly less than the recording time, and it can be annoying to travel with rechargeable cameras because of the need for socket adapters and the risk of short-circuiting your camera due to varying international voltage standards. Because the flip charges via USB, however, all I had to do was find a USB charger with the appropriate socket and charging became easy.

So, all in all, I'm upgrading this camera to a full five stars. I'd still consider it a niche product -- traveling tourist videocamera -- but it's pretty much an ideal camera for that niche.

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317 of 334 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Hard to recommend with so many gadgets w/video in market now, October 27, 2010

B. Edwards - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Flip UltraHD Video Camera - Black, 8 GB, 2 Hours (3rd Generation) NEWEST MODEL (Camera)

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I wavered between giving this three or four stars, but settled on four because it delivers what it promises in spades: EASY to use, high quality video recording in a small package. If I could, I would give a 3.5. There's a BIG "but" though:

The caveat here is that this is now a single-purpose, niche product, whose single purpose can be found on a number of different devices, from DSLR's, to point and shoot cameras, to smartphones (and probably non smart phones). You would be hard pressed to find even the lowliest point and shoot digital camera that doesn't record 720p video these days.

The one differentiator here is that this Flip shoots video at 60 frames per second, which is great if you are mostly going to be shooting outdoors, in bright light (because you SHOULD get smoother looking action, although most people can't see the difference). But it can actually be a disadvantage (vs the more standard 24 or 30fps) when shooting in lower light situations. I found this to be true as I compared several gadgets of mine (iPhone 4, Canon S95 digital camera, Canon HV30 HD camcorder), shooting the same indoors scene.

Just hard to recommend that anyone buy this today, knowing that almost every digicam on the market does 720p video now (and several of the new gen point and shoots do 1080p!) I shot the same scene (outdoors, but in very cloudy conditions) with my iPhone 4 and the Flip. The iPhone's video was slightly less contrasty, and a little more shaky looking due to no optical image stabilization like the Flip has. BUT at least I could focus on certain areas with the iPhone. With the Flip, I have no way to focus on a particular object, which is tough. I would bet MOST people would not be able to tell much of a difference in the picture quality between the two (unless you were watching them side by side, and even then, was difficult to determine a clear winner)

When these Flips first came out, they were a standout product because video in digicams was horrible at that time, and either nonexistent or poor on cel phones, but times have changed. For $200,today, you can buy an iPhone 4, or a point and shoot Sony digicam with a CMOS, low light sensor, that will shoot better video, plus you get the primary functions of those devices to boot. The video is just gravy.

PROS:
- Svelte, easy to carry and handle, outside black soft touch material very nice
- Good to very good video quality
- SO easy to use and hook up to another device for viewing the results.
- optical image stabilization works surprisingly well considering form factor, weight and small size of the Flip
- 60 fps great for outdoors/good light shooting

CONS:
- Hard to justify price when you can get at least as good video in other devices that do more than just video
- No ability to focus
- I wish the lens had more protection, or even a built in lens cap/cover. Note it does include a soft case, but I mean something like you see on most camcorders these days.
- Not great in low light due to 60fps recording (at least give the option to switch to something slower for low light situations?)

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