List Price: $229.00
Sale Price: $169.00
Today's Bonus: 26% Off
When Steve Jobs announced the newest generation iPod nano, he suggested that with its new video capability the nano would easily compete with the Flip Video camcorder. While someday down the line this may be a serious contender in the pocket video camera market, it's not there yet. I took some comparison footage with the iPod nano and the standard definition Flip Mino to show why. My point in all this is not to suggest that you go buy a Flip instead of an iPod nano, but that you ask yourself what it is you really want. If you want to make videos you can upload to Youtube and you want them to look pretty decent, and you don't care much about music or you already have an mp3 player, I wouldn't buy this iPod just because now it has video. On the other hand, having some video capability might be enough to give this the edge over most other music players; if games are more important to you than video, though, you'd be better off with an iPod touch.
One thing you'll notice in the footage, where I shot the same things back to back with both camcorders, is that where the Flip really shines is in low light. I shot the hamster moments at night, in a room illuminated only by a lamp. Not only did the iPod nano take grainy video, it also didn't do any kind of white balancing and the indoor lightbulb added an orange tint to the clip; I'm not sure exactly how the Flip is designed to address this (whether it automatically adjusts white balance or just has a better average setting), but the footage shows that it captured light correctly both outdoors and indoors. If you compare the hamster shots with the Flip and with the nano, I think it's clear that for indoor and lowlight there's no comparison and the Flip has the nano beat hands down. The outdoor images are closer, but I think even this small video shows greater detail in the Flip video. When you blow the images up bigger there's no comparison -the Flip looks decent even on a big screen TV, the iPod nano footage looks like it was shot with, well, a toy camera. In all fairness, that's all it is at this point. (Note, by the way, that, like the Flip, the nano will only take video and doesn't take photos. You can manually add photos to the nano from your computer, but you can't use the onboard camera to capture stills.)
Another thing that bugs me a bit about the new iPod nano is the bizarre placement of the camera lens. It's nestled down in the corner of the backside below the screen -exactly where it is most natural to hold this thing if you are shooting with it. Even if you just grasp the thing at the corners, there's a tendency for some part of a finger to accidentally edge into the camera frame. In fact, I found that even after I was aware of this fact I kept doing it anyways -the way this thing fits in my hands just makes it likely I'll catch an edge of a finger in my shots unless I'm conscientious about avoiding it, and that detracts from the spontaneity this is designed to take advantage of. (I even noticed I'd done it on most of the iPod nano footage for this video comparison -and I thought about doing it over, but then decided to leave it in just to show how easily it can happen.)
So, to sum up: what you really get with the iPod nano is a toy camera, fun to have in the pocket and very cool to have just in case there's something you want to shoot, but not quite the quality we've come to expect from the handy pocket camcorders like the Flip Mino and the Creative Vado and the Kodak Zi8, that keep getting better and better. Video is a nice new feature on the Nano, but not really a radical innovation and not a game changer.
What makes the iPod Nano worth it is that in addition to video on the fly, you get to listen to music, you get an FM radio that works quite well and even tells you what song you are listening to, you get a voice recorder (a VERY nice feature, excellent for students who can listen to music on their way to class and then record a lecture), a decent quality mini speaker, a somewhat useful pedometer, decent game options for killing time. You don't get any of that with the Flip! Sure, the new iPod nano is a toy ... but it's a very cool toy.
0 comments:
Post a Comment