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April 2008, Week 4
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 THE
EASY WAY
We finally broke down and bought the world's best-selling video camera:
the Flip. It costs $150 for the regular version, but we went wild and
sprang for an extra $30 to get the "ultra" version, which has higher
resolution and more memory.Either way, the cost is about a third of
what other video cameras sell for. The main
reason seems to be that it doesn't have all those attachments and
obscure, hard-to-use features that the higher-priced cameras have. That
means you can't charge as much. High-tech is a strange business.
The Flip has 13 percent of the world market for video cameras and is
far and away the No. 1-selling camcorder at giant online retailer
Amazon.com. Why? Because it is the
video equivalent of point-and-shoot.
The "flip" that gives the camera its name is a finger that flips out
of the side of the camera. You plug the finger into a USB socket on your
computer. Right away, a menu comes up with some easy choices: save to
computer, e-mail the video, upload to sites such as
YouTube,
Amazon and
MySpaceTV.com.
No more cable to carry around, no more rewinding a tape or
"finalizing a disk." You do need an extra cable if you want to watch
your Flip videos on a TV, but it comes in the box. If you want your
video burned to DVD, you can take it to a retail store that will do it
for you (see theflip.com/dvd )
or use the software that came on your computer.
A button on the side turns it on. Push the big red button on the back
to start recording video and sound. A screen above the button shows you
what you're recording. To play back what you recorded, hit the play
button that's next to the red button. That's it.
Flip is the same size as a cell phone,
only thicker and fits in a shirt pocket. It runs on two AA batteries.
There are limitations, which wouldn’t
bother most users but would make it unacceptable for others. The main
one is a recording limit of one hour. That seemed like plenty to us, but
if you’re a video fanatic, you want more. You can’t stretch the one-hour
limit because the memory is built into the camera and you can’t simply
add a larger compact flash card. When your hour is full, or anytime
before that, you can unload the memory contents to a computer and start
over with another hour. The Flip is also not so good for zooming. You
can zoom in 2X (two times closer) but the result is a little blurry.
The Flip works with Windows or
Mac and you can see lots of reviews and comments on use with a simple
web search on “Flip.” Joy said it's the first time she's had a video
camera she actually wanted to use.
Quick to Disk
We looked at Samsung’s new “TruDirect”
external hard drive, a natural for people who like to quickly burn
videos and movies to DVD.
One hour of video stored on the
computer can be burned to a DVD in just a half
 hour
using this drive. If the source is streaming video – which means it is
coming in live – the burn takes only five minutes longer than the actual
time of the stream. If you were taking video at a party, for example,
and had a computer and the drive nearby, you could pass out finished
DVDs to the guests just five minutes after you finished shooting.
Other methods of burning video
to DVD often takes three times as long as doing it with the TruDirect
drive. The key to this drive’s speed is that it skips using the
computer’s hard drive and takes the digital feed directly to DVD. There
is no pre-mastering, multiplexing or hard disk buffering being done by
the computer; that’s all handled by the drive.
To set up the device, you plug
the drive into a PC and install the software. It will recognize any
camcorder, digital camera or webcam that is plugged into the computer.
The DVD it creates will work with all players.
We found the TruDrive for $124 at
a-power.com .
TV
or not TV, That is the Question
Adobe has just introduced a free
player for watching TV shows available on the web. Go to
Adobe.com/go/mp to
download the software.
Once you have it and start up, you
will see a home page with thumbnail images of featured shows and a text
list of popular categories off to one side. The shows include the
popular “CSI” series, Jericho, Survivor and other current shows, as well
as golden oldies like The Twilight Zone, Hawaii Five-O and Melrose
Place. You can look for shows by name or click on the network buttons
(CBS, PBS, etc.) for lists of what they have available. You
can download the shows for later viewing or click to see them right
away.
If you go to the text list of
subjects, you get a choice of science and technology, comedy, news,
hobbies, education and many other subjects. Click on comedy and you get
some real TV shows, plus shorts and commentary created just for the web.
Go to science and technology and you can click on “Food Science,” for
example, which gives you lots of information and pictures on subjects
like fermentation, freezing and microwaving.
NOTE: Readers can search several years of columns here at
oncomp.com or seven years worth of columns at
oncomp2.com
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