Hasta La Gadget!

If your homemade computer includes parts scavenged from the neighbor’s trash, you might be a cheap geek.

1. Pure Digital’s Flip Video made videocameras affordable, but this is ridiculous. Amazon is selling an older model, the Flip Video Ultra, for only $59.99, and you get free shipping. That’s an incredibly cheap price for a pocket-size cam that shoots up to 30 minutes of VGA footage. It has a 1GB hard drive and comes with software for easy YouTube uploading. At this price, you can get one for the kids to play around with too.

2. Photography buffs, this one is for you: Canon is offering big instant rebates on select EOS cameras, lenses, and accessories between now and July 11. Check here for a full list of qualifying products.

3. This deal is the bomb! I say that because it’s for a speaker called the Bomb, and because it’s a very hip urban reference. (Going by the picture, I think the speaker should be called the Bowling Ball, but whatever.) The Bomb is a compact speaker made by iFrogz for portable music players. It regularly sells for $39.99, but is now on sale for 40 percent off. Use the code BOMB09 (good through tomorrow) and get an additional 10 percent off.

This morning, Pure Digital announced the latest addition to its Flip line of pocket camcorders. The UltraHD is an update to the original Flip Ultra, the camera that helped launched the YouTube camcorder revolution. The UltraHD shoots in 720p (1280 by 720) resolution–and interestingly, it’s actually one of the few HD camcorders that doesn’t also have a standard definition mode.

With the introduction of the UltraHD, the old Flip Ultra has been renamed the UltraSD. Both new cameras have been given a larger and much sharper screen (2 inches, compared with past versions’ 1.5 inches). The SD has 4GB of storage (the same as the Flip MinoHD) and the HD has 8GB of storage, which should give you roughly 2 hours of shooting time.

I was a bit skeptical when Pure Digital first told us that it was keeping the Ultra line alive after last year’s introduction of more portable Flip Mino and Flip MinoHD, but these cameras are being positioned as cheaper alternatives to their smaller counterparts at $149 and $199 for the UltraSD and UltraHD, respectively. And let’s face it, price was always a big part of the appeal of the Flip line.

I’ve got a full hands-on review of the new Flip UltraHD over at PCMag.com. After the jump, check out some closeup shots of the camcorder in action.

The Flip UltraHD is the true sequel to the cheap, crappy-but-good enough camcorder that’s smuggled 13 percent of the market and was once our favorite cheap camcorder.

Short answer: Just like the Ultra, but um, HD. The Flip UltraHD is actually not the first HD Flip camcorder—the runt of the litter, the Mino went high def first, and we thought for a while the fattie Flip Ultra was going to rot and die.

But it hasn’t. It’s been reincarnated with HD—720P shot in H.264 at 30FPS. I mean that fairly literally—if you were to take an Ultra and an UltraHD side by side, the only giveaway besides the branding is the Mini HDMI port on the side of the UltraHD. It’s got the same 2X digital zoom, the same fat ass. It’s like the MinoHD’s guts and soul inside of the Ultra’s body. Which is actually what annoys me the most about it. Its bigger, brighter, better screen is the antidote to my biggest problem with the MinoHD, but it’s so goddamn thick you can’t comfortably shove it in your pocket like the Mino. Keep the the width and height, but it should be thinner, even considering the depth needed for the little zoom lens. This is also pretty much the last camera Pure Digital can make like this—it feels like they’ve exhausted everything this particular package of camera and features can do. Whatever comes next needs to be actually different.

These comparison videos were filmed holding the MinoHD and UltraHD side-by-side—outside in the afternoon, and then outside at night, with crappy lighting to test and compare how well they handle low-lighting. (Sorry, in GA, I had nothing more interesting to shoot than my dog.) To me, the footage virtually looks the same coming out both from a quality standpoint. Clear with good lighting, visible but noisy as balls in low-lighting. Though, the UltraHD’s zoom lens does give you appreciated flexibility. (Update: It’s just digital zoom, my bad.) Overall, compared to the rest of the cheap camcorder market, if you consider the UltraHD’s quality equivalent to the MinoHD’s it looks like it’s still about tops, though not the best.

Our model’s got 8GB of storage and promises 120 minute of video out of it. If you don’t use the HDMI cable to plug it into your TV, you interface with it the same as always, via the pop-out USB jack. It comes with a rechargeable pair of batteries, but you can pop in some standard AA if you want.

At $200 retail it’s not the cheapest cheapcam in the pack by any means—you can pick up the slightly older Kodak Zi6, another pocket HD camcorder that we like a bunch and shoots slightly cleaner video for $140 or its weatherproof cousin for $150, though you have to add in the cost of additional SDHC storage. That said, compared to the MinoHD, you get twice the recording capacity and bigger, brighter screen for about the same price, with the cost being the fatass. So it really depends what part of the triangle is most important to you: Size, storage and video quality. But you can’t go too wrong with the UltraHD. [Flip]

Thanks Best Buy, we owe you (another) one. Yet again, the big box retailer everyone loves to hate has provided the world with a glimpse of a heretofore unannounced product, and this one’s got our mouths all kinds of damp. Barely a month after Cisco picked up Pure Digital for a small fortune, the Flip Video Ultra HD — which seems to be the natural successor to the standard Ultra — has already begun to hit select store shelves in America. Notable niceties include an HDMI output, 120 minutes of record time (up from 60 minutes), a removable / rechargeable battery and support for AA cells in a pinch. We’re still waiting for the full rundown of specifications (and the price, too), but feel free to tap the read link for a stellar unboxing in the meanwhile.

Update: Looks like it’s going for $199.99. Thanks Matthies!

Filed under: Digital Cameras

Flip Video Ultra HD makes its unofficial debut, gets unboxed originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 26 Apr 2009 15:42:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Wanted our attention, Casio? Well, good, because you’ve definitely got it. This isn’t necessarily full disclosure of the phone’s existence, but for all practical purposes, this… uh, “promotional video” finally fesses up that the Exilim C721 is coming to Verizon (you can catch a glimpse of the carrier’s logo if you look closely — no, not that closely, you sicko). As you might have gathered, our ladyfriend here is using the phone’s 5 megapixel cam to snap some naughty shots for her sweetheart, all from the comfort of a warm shower — thanks in no small part to the phone’s water-resistant characteristics. Still no word on pricing, availability, or a full rundown of specs, so in the meantime we’re going to be… you know, looping this looking for details. Catch the video after the break.

[Via Gearlog]

Continue reading Verizon’s Casio Exilim C721 confirmed in the middle of a steamy shower scene

Filed under: Cellphones

Verizon’s Casio Exilim C721 confirmed in the middle of a steamy shower scene originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 09 Apr 2009 23:38:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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