Flipping the video

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: It has been a gloomy autumn for retailers selling television sets, audio gear and other consumer electronics. Demand for such goods, according to Retrevo, a search and shopping site, has headed steadily south since last summer. It spiked in late November (the traditional start of the holiday shopping season) as bargain-hunters knocked down doors to snap up one-time offers, then promptly fizzled out again.

Surprisingly, one of the few product categories to defy the downward trend has been the video camera. Eclipsed by the past decade’s helter-skelter development in digital photography, digital video has only just begun to re-emerge into the spotlight.

Two disruptive developments seem to be driving camcorder sales. One is the ‘Flip’ pocket camcorder from Pure Digital Technologies, which burst onto the scene 18 months ago, prompting a wave of copycat models from other manufacturers. By stripping out all but the essentials, the Flip created a new type of camcorder that has revitalised the market.

Like point-and-shoot digital cameras, the new mini-camcorders simply work. Being no bigger than an iPod means they can be carried everywhere, making them always ready to capture ‘special moments’ that would be lost while digging out a bigger camcorder and firing it up.

Weighing a few ounces and running off a couple of AA batteries, they capture video with DVD quality (640-by-480 resolution) at 30 frames per second, and store it on tiny flash-memory cards. A USB jack slides out of the camera to transfer the video to a personal computer for easy editing and playback.

Thanks to their MPEG-4 video compression, Flip-like devices produce movies virtually as good as bigger camcorders costing hundreds of dollars more but using the less efficient MPEG-2 algorithm. A year ago, your correspondent paid $79 for an RCA Small Wonder that offered more features and an even lower price than the original Flip.

The star of the current crop is the Kodak Zi6. With its 2.4-inch screen and ability to record high-definition (720p) video, the Zi6 has a street price of around $140. The other disruptive development that’s driving camcorder sales is the widespread adoption of high-definition television (HDTV), which is now in 40 million (one in three) American homes.

Viewers with a 50-inch HDTV set who’ve grown accustomed to watching high-definition broadcasting, Blu-ray discs or even ‘up-sampled’ DVDs that emulate the latter’s resolution, find the video quality of ordinary camcorders disappointing.