I went to costco today to pick up some snacks for the office. While there, I saw that they had a much wider variety of items than usual. A LowePro camera bag for a great price, some new cameras, etc. And…a Flip Video Ultra unit. I’ve been wanting one of these for a year at least, and it’s something we legitimately want to try out at work so I got it. Sure, I’ll use it a bit for my own stuff to “test it” but it is for work, and I have good reasons to try it out. So I grabbed it.
Now…a few months later, while at Educause, I am seeing how I could have used it had I thought for about it for a second and brought it along. A small but not-too-small form factor, very good video quality, and the easiest darn controls out there. It’s a really impressive unit.
The only thing I wish I could do is hack is for 2 hours of recording. Go back to the lower quality compression used in the original Flip that gave 1 hour in half the capacity. Then, we could roll these out as set-it-up-yourself video recording for classes. Think about that – short of a major infrastructure installation for recording, we just hand one of these to a professor and voila. Our classes are all more than 60 minutes so we’d need that hack.
Great product. Wish it had that one feature, though..
I tried a Flip out last year. It’s nice and easy for video and even just for audio (with a constant image), however, I ran into a problem once where for some reason, I wasn’t able to pull the video with the usb plugged into my computer. I don’t remember if I was eventually able to get it off the device. Kenneth might have a better memory of it.