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Video Camera That Does Less, Sells More
By Martin English | March 28, 2008
The NY Times has a piece on The Flip —
Somebody at Pure Digital must have sat through countless meetings, steadfastly refusing to cede any ground to the forces of feature creep.
Here’s a list of some of the stuff it can’t do:
The screen is tiny (1.5 inches) and doesn’t swing out for self-portraits. You can’t snap still photos. There are no tapes or discs, so you must offload the videos to a computer when the memory is full (30 or 60 minutes of footage, depending on whether you buy the $150 or $180 model). There are no menus, no settings, no video light, no optical viewfinder, no special effects, no headphone jack, no high definition, no lens cap, no memory card. And there’s no optical zoom — only a 2X digital zoom that blows up and degrades the picture. Ouch.
And here’s a list of stuff it can do:
Instead, the Flip has been reduced to the purest essence of video capture. You turn it on, and it’s ready to start filming in two seconds. You press the red button once to record (press hard — it’s a little balky) and once to stop. You press Play to review the video, and the Trash button to delete a clip.
According to the Manufacturer, it has taken 13% of the market.
The reason is that it just works. It’s always ready, it’s always trustworthy, it’s always with you. The selling point is not techno gee-whizzery, it is the convenience and simplicity. You simply can’t make a mistake, you can’t do anything wrong.
Its purpose is pure to the core: Shoot quick videos without thinking about it.
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