BBC News – Cisco shuts down Flip video camera business.
This is quite saddening. The Flip was a great idea and a great design. Yes, other cameras with similar form factor surpassed it fairly early on in terms of features, but everyone still had the Flip. We even use it for check out at work, since it’s just so darn easy to use.
That Cisco bought it as part of losing its way and then has to shut it down is upsetting.
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..