Flip MinoHD makes it all very clear

In 2007, consumers went wild for the Flip Ultra, a pocket-sized video camera priced at just $150. Why not? It was cheap for a video camera, easy to carry, and easy to use.

Indeed, the Flip Ultra had just one major defect - its video quality is pretty lousy. The camera is good enough for recording scenes from Junior's birthday party, and more than good enough for posting gag videos on YouTube. The Flip Ultra is even good enough for The Boston Globe, which issues them to reporters for shooting quick Internet videos of news events.

But the Flip Ultra's picture quality can't match what you get from even a cheap standard camcorder. People buy Flip Ultras for simplicity and portability, not for razor-sharp video.

For that, they will buy the new Flip MinoHD. As the name implies, it's a high-definition video camera that produces video with 720 lines of resolution, compared with the 480 lines of the original Flip. The extra lines result in videos that are crisper and clearer than those from the Flip Ultra.

The MinoHD carries a list price of $230 - $80 more than the Flip Ultra. Buy at the company website, www.theflip.com, and you can have your MinoHD customized with your choice of colors or other decorations, at no additional charge. Or you can save a few bucks by buying elsewhere. Wal-Mart's Internet store sells the MinoHD for $210, and Amazon.com is asking just $207.

The MinoHD is smaller and lighter than the original Flip, and as easy to use. Just power it up and press a big red button to start shooting. To get at your videos, press the famous Flip switch and out pops a USB connector that connects to a Windows PC or Apple Macintosh computer. The MinoHD, like earlier Flips, comes with built-in software that copies videos to the computer, lets you upload them to online video services like YouTube, or do some rudimentary editing.

The MinoHD uses a built-in rechargeable battery, unlike earlier Flips, which run on replaceable AA batteries. The rechargeable has enough power to fill up the MinoHD's four gigabytes of memory - about an hour of video shooting time. There's no external memory slot for boosting capacity, but given the limits of its rechargeable battery, that's probably no loss.

And yes, the pictures are very nice indeed - even close-ups shot with the camera's digital zoom feature. Digital zoom works by electronically enlarging the tiny picture elements or "pixels" that form the image. This results in enlarged pixels and a muddied image. On the original Flip, zoomed images are nearly unwatchable. But the MinoHD sharper image stands up well even under digital zoom.

The MinoHD's virtues are also defects. It fits in a pocket, but for that reason lacks the wraparound, hand-steadying grip found on standard camcorders. And there's no image stabilization circuitry to smooth out the inevitable twitches. So unless you use a tripod or have the hands of a brain surgeon, your videos will often bounce around like a fight scene in "The Bourne Identity."

The camera's sharp, high-definition videos take up huge amounts of space and demand massive processing power. You will need a Windows PC or Macintosh made in the last year or two, and equipped with a dual-core processor and a couple of gigabytes of memory. Older, slower machines can't even play back high-def video properly, much less allow you to edit.

You can connect the MinoHD directly to a TV and play the movies that way, but don't expect a glorious HD experience. The camera comes with a composite analog TV connector, the kind found on your old 1980s VCR. Maybe that's why a video that looked fine when played back on a Mac was horrible when pumped directly into a Samsung HDTV.

To watch MinoHD videos in the living room, you're better off burning them onto a DVD first.

For more disappointment, try uploading MinoHD videos to YouTube. Flip's included software makes the process simple enough, but the results were appalling. The videos I uploaded looked far worse than those created on inferior cameras.

Flip has just introduced new software that's supposed to improve the quality of uploaded videos. There's also a problem with YouTube, which reduces video quality to conserve bandwidth. But now that lots of people are uploading HD video to YouTube, the company has started offering two versions of such videos.

Normally, you'll see the awful, low-quality edition. But you'll see a link to the high-quality version. I clicked it, and my videos, while still far from their original HD glory, were now tolerable.

If you're only shooting videos to share online, you can get by with the cheaper Flip Ultra. But there's more to life than YouTube. And for an extra $80, the MinoHD produces videos that look good however you watch them.

Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray@globe.com.