Wow. Colour laser for $200. How times have changed.

Wow, that is a good price. I'm sorry I missed it. My eleven-year-old HP 6L finally died Tuesday. I replaced it with an HP P1006 for $100 at Best Buy. I just hope it lasts as long.

I was thinking about getting my daughter a cheap camcorder for X-mas. Has anyone had any experience with these Flip Video units?

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It sounds like it would be good and simple to use. I'm not looking for the world's greatest quality, just something that would look ok as a web video or on standard definition TV.

I had one and I *loved* it for home movies. It died at the hands of my toddler on vacation in Canada (apparently you can only toss it into a lake so many times before it gives up in disgust), but I'll be getting another one just as soon as I have a little extra cash.

The only thing I really disliked about it was the mic placement - it's on the back of the unit so it picks up the person holding the camera instead of the person the camera is pointed at. But the video quality is really excellent for the price, and it's dead easy to use (it has about 4 buttons total). It can also take a fair amount of abuse - ours survived several drops onto the floor before the lake incident killed it for good.

wrong thread

I adore the flip for the kind of uses you're talking about. It's the kind of dead easy that makes video something you can just do rather than having it be a big (pardon the pun) production.

Note that if she wants to start getting creative, the software that comes on the flip sucks giant rocks is really only good for things like trimming the start and end points of your clips and saving/sending/posting to youtube. But the raw clips are right there in a folder, so it's easy-peasy to pull the clips off the camera and into something like Movie Maker or iMovie, if she wants to play that way.

The newer model (the Mino) has mics on both front and back, so it's better at picking up sound in front of the camera than it used to be, but you still pick up too much of your own breathing and such. The Mino is rechargeable, whereas the Ultra runs on AAs -- I prefer rechargeable, but I know some people would rather use batteries in order to be able to have a spare. YMMV on that one.

eta: note that I have not yet dropped one into a lake.

The newer model (the Mino) has mics on both front and back

Oh that's good to know. My next one will probably be a Mino.

Oh! I know a woman who put a camera mount on her motorcycle handlebars so she could cruise around Bike Week shooting the scene with her flip. Not that I'd recommend a bike at age 9... but it's a fairly rugged little machine, what with being all solid-state and such.

The flip website indicates that the Ultra has a front microphone as well.

Dude, this is apropos of nothing, but I went to install my gigabit ethernet pci card (not realizing it was pci express) in my old desktop and good heavens was there a lot of dust in it. I dumped it all out on my desk thinking I'd be able to easily clean it up later, but I am sneezing like mad now. So, lots of dust, no gigabit ethernet. Otoh, the desktop should run better now.