If you're a child of the 'aughts, you've probably seen a Flip Video camera at least once in your life. Before cellphone videos were a thing, these bad boys ruled the amateur video circuit with their ease of use and novel design that incorporated a literal flipping USB port on the side. But what happened to these once ubiquitous cameras?
I had an uncle who would walk around and record just about everything with one of these cameras. Even for my wedding in 2012, long after video on cellphones had outpaced the Flip cameras by a country mile, there he was, holding his 2007-era Flip on a selfie stick, recording everything.
Another person who has a soft spot for Pure Digital's Flip camera lineup is "Krazy" Ken of Computer Clan on YouTube. He's actually managed to find a working first-generation Flip 160 camera (the cameras were so named because of their recording times, 130 for 30 minutes or 160 for 60 minutes). Granted, the first-generation Flips were rebrands of Pure Digital's point-and-shoot cameras with some slight tweaks, but I digress.
Ken goes through the video and audio quality of the cameras, which, while they don't hold up today, were perfectly acceptable when they were released.
The ace-in-the-hole was the built-in USB connection. In an age where I was fiddling around with wires and Mini-DV tapes, or early-era hard-drive-based camcorders, these cameras just plugged directly into the computer. If you watch the video above, operation of the camera was limited to mostly one button and a four-way controller. It was dead simple in a time when shooting video was anything but, and consumers jumped on it, making it one of the most popular cameras of its day.
So why isn't it around anymore? It's easy to blame cell phones, but that's really not the case. Ken explores the myriad reasons the company stopped making the cameras, and you can learn what those are in the video above.
In the meantime, I'm going to pour one out for Flip. If you're a fan, you can do the same in the comments below.
