This is a killer device.

It's tiny - really easy to take anywhere.

It holds 60 minutes of video.

It has a flip usb that easily plugs into any laptop which serves not only to transfer files, but to charge the device as well.

The video quality is pretty damn good, and the Flip software makes it easy to push your videos to YouTube, or even to send an email card to your friends. A 10 minute video will be about 900mb!

It's amazingly steady when you film - none of that bouncing "Blair Witch" effect that you often see with handheld cameras. If you're going to be using this camcorder for interviews and such, there's a neat little tripod you can get for like $12.

The only downside to this little gadget is that you will find yourself filming everything, which gets annoying for people, I think.

I bought this to record family events but also to record ballroom dancing lessons and events without lugging around a big camcorder. It worked beautifully at Thanksgiving and guests got a big kick out of playing back the events of the day and watching themselves projected via my computer to my front projector tv. Even with a 10ft diagonal picture the hd image was quite good. Recording dancing was more problematic since framing with the 16:9 aspect ratio (there is no other option) and non wide angle lens wasn't good. The distance to frame a 6 foot vertical object (dancer) entirely with the camera is about 17 feet. Because we liked the camera so much, i looked for a solution and have found a sunpak wide angle lens (.45x, cam2100, available from amazon for about $35) that fits beautifully on the camera and mounts magnetically therefore retaining the small size advantage of the mino HD. With this lens, one can frame an entire person at about 12 feet which compares quite well to much more expensive cameras. Color does wash out in low light but low light capabilities were nevertheless better than I expected. You can obtain very usable video in a darkened ballroom.
I agree with all the great comments about ease of use, build quality and the intuitive software. There is an easy learning curve to using this but you quickly find out that you must move the camera very slowly or you'll see lots of shake and motion artifact. Shake is less with the wide angle lens and worse with the zoom. A good tripod would certaily help. The mini tripod from flip is pretty flimsy and the camera is too small to work well with my full size tripod. I've read the gorilla tripod works well but haven't tried it.
Overall, it performed better than expected and especially with the addition of the wide angle lens, I rate it highly.

Works great. The Software included is very easy to use. Also works well with iMovie 08. I was able to easily upload movie in mpeg4 format directly to a mobileme web gallery as well as to google video. I did not even bother converting it to quicktime as I will probably be archiving most of my videos on Google anyway (as it allows to to control access better than youtube does). We are having a baby in the next couple of weeks so this will be perfect to easily capture quality video to share with the Grandparents that live Canada.

Opened up an early Xmas gift 2 days ago and have already created a 10 minute movie and a few more clips around the house. The ease of use is astounding and the picture quality is excellent for a device (sensor) so small and with no image stabilization. I got the two free accessories offer from Amazon (tripod and case). The tripod really helps keep the picture steady and I would recommend using it whenever possible. When it is not possible to use the tripod, do what you can to steady yourself and your hand (e.g walking and shooting video is not a good idea) as the shaking only gets amplified on large screen TV. Also, when you need to pan, do so slowly without jerks. Also note that with a 1.5m minimum focus point, you have to be at least 5 away from your subject to have them in focus. This focal point is greater than both the mino, ultra and original flip series camcorders.

The minoHD is extremely easy to use. It had about 50% battery charge out of the box. Time lag between powering on and being able to record seems to depend on the amount of video already on the memory (# of clips/size of clips). With no video on it, you can shoot in about 3-4 seconds. With about 10 mins of video on it, it took almost 6-7 seconds. This is still better than most camcorders I have used. The 1 hr of storage is ample for my needs and style of shooting. Audio quality is OK and the highs (treble) seems on the higher side. Some reviewers suggested this device should have a mic input to add an external mic - I agree it would help with audio quality when recording say, your child's concert at school, however for most speech this is sufficient.

For my first project, I recorded over 30 clips totaling 10 minutes during my toddler's outing to the museum. Back home, I plugged in the flip minoHD into the USB port on my macbook pro and found 4 ways to download the video content:
1. Install the included flipshare software and use that to view what's on the camera and your HDD
2. iPhoto opened up automatically and asked if I wanted to download videos from the camera
3. I could have copied the files directly from the device to my desktop using Finder (explorer)
4. Launch iMovie and click on the camera logo

I installed the flipshare software and in <3 minutes was able to view the clips on the flip. Saving all clips to the computer is easy. Next I created a movie by selecting 29 of the 30+ clips and clicking on the movie button in flipshare. The feature allows you reorder/delete/add clips, add title in the beginning, credits at the end and also add music (sample supplied) from your mp3 collection. Finally, you can preview the results at all steps in the 4 step process. The final step is to export the movie to a single file. This took about 20 minutes for a 10 minute total movie time. The finished video was in .mov format (I wish it was .mp4 like the original clips). From here you can upload the movie (or if you prefer the individual, unedited clips) to YouTube. With YouTube now supporting widescreen and high quality video, this is a no-brainer method to share good quality video with others.

Why not 5-stars:
1. I would love to be able to edit clips, mainly to trim them using the flipshare software, but the mac version does not allow this (not sure about the Windows version)
2. focal point of 1.5m to infinity is higher than I would like it to be. Had it started at 1m or lower, that would have been perfect.
3. The quickest way to watch recorded clips on your TV is also the worst - i.e. the included composite video and audio cable. The output is NTSC (I think that's close to 480i) and in 4:3 aspect ratio with black bars above and below the video (letterboxed). So on a widescreen TV, it looks stretched width-wise, or compressed height-wise. Maybe there is a way to change the output to 16:9, but I haven't found it. Instead, I converted the final edited movie to M4v and pushed it to my Apple TV for viewing - much better, but process takes longer.

In a nutshell, I am very pleased with this little device and expect to use it a lot more than any previous camcorder I have.

I owned an RCA EZ201 Small Wonder 60 Minute Point-and-Shoot Camcorder before coming into possession of a Flip Video MinoHD Camcorder. There is no comparison in image quality, and the price difference reflects this. The Small Wonder does, however, have two features that I consider useful that the MinoHD lacks. One is the ability to use replaceable batteries (the MinoHD has a built-in rechargeable Lithium battery). The other is a flip-out display screen that enables the user to get in front of the camera while seeing exactly what is being recorded.

The MinoHD comes in an attractive, elegant black box, with none of the difficult-to-open plastic that we've come to expect electronic gadgets to be packed in. A high-gloss image of the MinoHD adorns three sides of the box, and the overall quality of the box broadcasts that it contains a high-quality item (reminiscent of the packaging for fine perfumes, watches, and fountain pens). This, plus the item's quality, makes it an ideal gift item for anyone who might have use for a pocket- and purse-size camcorder.

Open the box, slide out the inner black box, and one sees that this box is designed not only to hold the unit but to display it (again, in the way the packaging for many fountain pens and watches are designed). Flip open the lid of the inner box and there is the MinoHD nestled in a black cardboard bedding that lifts out to allow one to access the TV cable, wrist strap, carrying bag, and instruction manual. The packaging for the MinoHD is a work of design art and makes for a most impressive display.

Charging the unit is simple: Flip out the USB connection and plug it in. Once the unit is charged, using it is as intuitive and simple as can be. I first used it on Thanksgiving at an 18-person family gathering. A couple of days later I took it to an art museum where I mostly used it in those areas where the use of cameras (but not flashes) are allowed and a little bit in areas where the use of cameras were not allowed. Friends who saw the "legal" and "illegal" museum segments on the MinoHD's display screen as well as friends who saw them on a large TV/monitor, were so impressed that they swore they would get to the museum before the exhibits I'd captured clips of were taken down.

Within my first days of having the MinoHD in my possession I also took a number of clips of my just-turned-6-months-old granddaughter, and these clips are as clear and sharp as I could want when I play them on my laptop and TV.

Price is obviously a factor for anyone considering purchasing the MinoHD for themselves or for someone else as a gift. The price will no doubt come down over time, and in six months or a year a high definition model or models will appear on the market that will make the MinoHD slide toward obsolescence. My advice to anyone who isn't sure if the quality of the image offered by the MinoHD is worth the price (to the potential buyer), is to find a store where you can compare mini camcorder video images on a large screen. My advice to anyone considering purchasing the MinoHD as a gift for someone who you are reasonably sure will actually regularly use a mini camcorder, is, if the cost of the MinoHD is in the ballpark of what you want to spend on a gift for the individual in question, the MinoHD is an excellent choice that anyone who appreciates quality will surely be impressed by.

I love this camcorder - so much, in fact, that I gave away my 3 yr old MiniDV camcorder. The flip mino takes more than adequate video quality for filming the kids or family activities - it's not professional movie quality, but at this price point, that's an unrealistic expectation. What really sets it apart and makes it the only camcorder I use, is it's small size and ease of downloading videos onto the computer for saving or emailing. The software is embedded on the camcorder itself and installs the first time you plug it in, after that you just plug in and choose what you want to do - save it, which only takes a few minutes. Emailing takes longer to upload to flip's servers, but is wonderful because you can email out much larger and longer videos than you could thru traditional email (unless you want to spend hours transcoding to smaller resolution before sending). This camcorder is easily small enough to toss into your purse so you always have it handy, which is actually where I keep mine when not in use. My only complaint is that when I try to combine multiple videos to make a movie, the process crashes and it can't even begin (I'm running windows vista, with intel onboard video). However, this is a minor complaint, since I don't really plan on making a bunch of movies or dvd's - if I wanted to do that, I would've kept my big expensive tape camcorder. And this can still be done using other traditional video editing software. This is primarily for those who want to have videos and be able to keep them and manage them on their computer as easily as they do their photos, or for those who want to be able to easily email or upload their videos to the internet. Lowlight quality, which is typically an issue for all camcorders, is great - there is some noise, but it still does better than my 3 yr old minidv camcorder. If there was anything I felt it was lacking, that would be an electronic image stabilization - but that would also add to the price.