Creative may have just come out with its cheap flash-based camcorder, the Vado but Pure Digital wasn’t just sitting on its thumbs.  While Creative thought it really had something, Pure Digital was hard at work getting together its newest product, the Flip Mino which has just been released.

The two devices are very similar so let’s compare them.

Both feature capture VGA resolution video at 640 x 480 and have 2x digital zooms.  I know it would be better if they had optical zooms and the reason they don’t is probably as a cost saving measure but I would gladly pay extra for it.  They have rechargeable Lithium Ion batteries (to me, this is a good thing for the Flip) but there are differences in battery life between the two.  The Ultra and Flip Video made use of AA batteries which contributed to the bulk, I prefer slim devices and will disregard the convenience of AA batteries if the device is light and slim.

The Creative Vado has a 2” LCD display which is larger than the Flip Mino’s 1.5” display.  It can also capture up to two hours of video as opposed to just on hour with the Mino; however, the Vado sacrifices video quality to do that.

Another difference is that the Flip Mino has touch sensitive controls as opposed to well, what I would consider “awkward” push button controls on the Vado.  But, I consider anything with push button controls “awkward” – every device should have touch sensitive controls – within reason, exceptions would be remote controls and keyboards.

Both devices can also capture VGA quality still images from the video.  They are not going to replace your $800 hi-def camcorder but are meant to capture day-to-day things that you may not normally capture.  However, it should still come down to video quality and the Flip Ultra (the predecessor of the Mino) has the Vado beat hands down).

The audio and video quality of the Ultra was just superior in almost every respect to that of the Vado, despite being bulkier, it would have been my pick.  Now that the Mino is out, it will probably best the Vado as well.  I can’t say for sure but Pure Digital has tweaked the audio and video processing engine on the Mino, what it calls “Video Engine 2.5” as opposed to version 2.0 on the Ultra and 1.0 on the Flip Video, so quality should be improved over all previous versions.

In addition, the Mino boasts four hour battery life as opposed to the Vado’s two but the Mino’s battery is not replaceable whereas the Vado’s is.  That’s a trade-off I’m willing to make.

I really wish Pure Digital had seen fit to equip the Mino with some kind of expandable storage either through SD or microSD cards, this is where it fails but its video quality exceeds that of most of its competitors which do offer expandability.  This just means you will be hauling your laptop with you on vacation so you can offload the video when the memory is full (plus you need to charge it via USB).

Though, it’s not officially in retail stores yet, the Mino can be purchased online from Amazon.com in either black or white.

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Entry was posted on Wednesday, June 4th, 2008 at 12:17 pm under Uncategorized.

Read more entries by Jonathan Schlaffer.
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