INBOX:CAMCORDERS ARE becoming increasingly powerful but something strange has happened in the past couple of years: the really interesting video cameras have turned out to be the simplest ones.
In what appeared to be a bizarre move, Cisco, which makes the black boxes called routers that run large parts of the internet, bought the small firm that makes the Flip camcorder.
Why? It turned out people simply love the simplicity of a one-button recorder, and the Flip was a smash hit. This does seem to make sense when you think about it – features can be crammed into modern devices but if we don’t use them why are we paying for them?
Following this trend towards simplicity, Toshiba came up with the Camileo P30 ultra-compact camcorder in an attempt, it seemed, to beat the Flip at its own game.
Launched last June, the Camileo had higher resolution than the Flip Ultra and more features.
The Flip Mino HD then bettered it, with 720p resolution, but now the Camileo has been updated.
The new Camileo P30 comes in at about €170 – slightly less than the Flip Mino HD – and offers “near” 1080p resolution of 1,440 x 1,080 pixels, which is better than the 720p of the Flip. It also has 5x optical zoom and a 2-4x digital zoom
There is a slight problem, however: the P30’s 128MB of built-in memory. That’s 90 seconds of 1080p video – not exactly long. But then few people buy these cameras without getting
extra
memory. Although the Flip Mino HD has 4GB of memory, equivalent to an hour of 720p video, you can’t expand it, which is limiting.
The P30 has a mini-USB port to transfer files on to a Mac or PC via USB, as well as HDMI and AV connectors to plug into a television.
Mac users can import straight into iMovie but PC users will need the bundled ArcSoft MediaImpression software to play the camera’s MOV files or they will need to download QuickTime from the Apple website.
The P30’s upright “pistol grip” design feels much better than the Flip “brick”, although the 2.5in LCD viewfinder is a bit fragile, so the Flip’s brick design perhaps wins after all.
The P30 has more features, such as video-image stabilisation, macro mode and a still-photo shooting mode. And while the video is not fully high definition (HD), the resolution is sharp.
Ultimately, an easy-to-use camcorder designed for shooting YouTube-style videos is the Flip’s strength but, for anyone who is more ambitious in what they would like to achieve, the Camileo P30 is a good choice.
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