Allen Weiner

As previously stated, I am a video guy. Back in the day, I was an A/V nerd and even worked after school to repair broken educational films by resplicing them when they cracked as they were wont to do. So, when the online consumer video craze began to surface about five years ago, I became a Web 2.0 A/V nerd and starting creating videos (aka UGC).

I am in possession of five video cameras and one mobile phone with great video capability. Each camera seems to fit a purpose, and those from Pure Digital have become my go-to devices when I am trying to be inconspicuous (like videoing surreptitiously in Graceland) yet grab a clip with good picture and sound. My original, about three or four years old, is a rather innocuous looking white device with simple features, and is a big banged up from being dropped a zillion times (and keeps on tickin’) and from having shot about 400 videos in places ranging from the Underground in London to the waterfront in Cannes. One of my most viewed videos on YouTube shows off the beauty of this little wonder—I grabbed a quick interview with one of the Tampa Bay Rays (nee Devil Rays), Fernando Perez, as he emerged from the locker after the Arizona Fall league Championship in 2006. The camera fires up quickly and is made for those spontaneous moments you want to capture on video.

Last week, the nice folks at Pure Digital sent me its latest camera, the minoHD. It’s smaller and lighter than the original mostly because it uses a rechargeable lithium battery as opposed to two AA batteries in the original. To compare the old and the new, I took the cameras to a Fall League baseball game and shot essentially the same scene with both cameras. Below are the results.

Original Pure Digital

MinoHD

What I like about the new camera: Battery life indicator; more brightly lit viewfinder; on-off switch on the side to avoid an accidental shutoff while filming; better in-viewer previewing; tripod mount; better software to create video clips and seamlessly upload them to YouTube, AOL (oops, AOL’s shutting that down next week) and Myspace.

What I miss from the older model: More intuitive zoom.

The HD capability in the mino is not the sort of 1080-I HD you will find in your home plasma, but the quality is noticeable when you play the videos on a bright video monitor or burn them on a DVD. Given that YouTube does an iffy job on transcoding, the resulting video you get after uploading to YouTube is no different than from any other camera. If you want to get more out of your HD clips, I suggest uploading to Vimeo or Blip.TV.

And here’s my dream: A Pure Digital camera with a WiFi radio inside to allow me to stream live (ala Qik) or go to a hotspot and upload on the fly. Will I see one of these at CES? I sure hope so.