Creative Vado Pocket Video Cam

Clearly looking to cash in on the craze for the Flip in the US, Creative’s take on the pocket-size digital video camera is essentially a carbon copy of its equally low-cost counterpart. With a resolution of a mere 640 x 480, the Creative Vado won’t be winning any awards for picture quality, but like the Flip, this isn’t a video camera for budding film-makers.

The idea is that the Vado is a video camera that you carry with you everywhere and reach for whenever you see something worth committing to video – or at least uploading to YouTube. The Vado is barely bigger than a mobile phone and looks much like one too, which means it’s ideal for a spot of surreptitious filming in places where a more traditional-looking video camera would draw unwanted attention.

Better yet, the Vado is also unbelievably simple to use. If you’ve ever missed a photo opportunity through fiddling with your camera’s settings, you’ll appreciate the need for simplicity when it comes to capturing anything remotely candid. At around four seconds, the Vado takes a little too long to start up for truly spontaneous shooting, but just a single button press sets it recording and the menu system has just four options, not that you’ll need to use them beyond the initial set-up.

With a resolution of just 640 x 480, the Vado won’t win any awards for picture quality and the digital zoom is best avoided (and it can’t be disabled). Nonetheless, recordings are surprisingly clear and smooth (30fps), and not too awful even in very dim environments. The lens has a suitably wide angle too, though the fixed focus makes it useless for filming anything closer than six inches or so.

The Vado can hold around an hour of video in HQ in its 2Gb of onboard memory, or two in SD mode. There isn’t much difference in quality between these two video modes – SD is a little softer, but this makes little difference if you’re just planning to upload clips to YouTube.

The 2in screen is fine for instant replays of recordings you’ve just made and it stays reasonably clear in bright daylight, though it’s easy enough to make recordings without seeing what you’re doing. The Vado also has a 3.5mm socket for connecting to a TV, though you’ll need to source your own cable.

Clips are stored as MPEG4 (XviD codec) AVI files, which makes uploading to online video sharing sites a doddle – there’s no intermediate transcoding required. The Vado has a short, captive USB lead (clipped in place with a magnet) and appears in Windows as a removable drive for simple drag-and-drop access. The Vado’s removable battery recharges when it’s plugged into a powered USB port too, and is good for around two hours of use.

Alternatively, the Vado Central Windows application stored in its onboard memory shows thumbnails for the stored video clips, making it easier to see which you want to transfer. Vado Central can also upload clips to YouTube and PhotoBucket directly.

You can see some sample video clips from the Vado below – the first is in SD mode, the rest are in HQ.

Cheap little video cameras have been around for years, but its capacious storage and good quality video put the Vado a few notches higher that the ghastly fare you tend to see being flogged on home shopping channels. It’s no replacement for a proper video camera, but if your digital camcorder spends most of its time languishing in a cupboard, the Creative Vado is a great way to get you back in the groove.