I picked up a Creative Vado today. This might seem a bit weird, given that I already have the beautiful Sony TG3 HD Camcorder– but it does make sense, let me explain.

On my holiday there is a chance that I will end up going on a white water rafting trip. The instructions say wear a swimming costume under your clothes and pack a change of clothes as it is likely you will get wet. Now I don’t expect to get totally submerged given that this is the family friendly Cruise Passenger version of a white water rafting trip. but equally this doesn’t sound like a good place to take my £550 Sony Camcorder, so enter the Vado.

You will probably have heard of the Flip Video and maybe even read good things about it. The Flip has been credited with capturing 13% of the US camcorder market in the year or so it has been available. That’s stretching the definition of camcorder a bit if you ask me, I’d consider these devices to be in a category of their own (video clip recorder?) Well at the time of writing, the Flip is not freely available in the UK, but Creative’s version (homage?), the Vado is (I think it only came out a couple of days ago).

The Vado takes simplicity to a new level. The box contents are: The camera, its battery and a couple of instruction leaflets. No carry case, no lanyard, no discs, nuffin.

The camera is roughly the size of a thin mobile phone (it reminds me of one of the Motorolas). It’s very lightweight and slips easily in a shirt pocket or could hang around a neck if a spare lanyard can be acquired from somewhere.

Controls again are foolproof, Record, Play, Delete, FF, Rev, Power. The USB plug pops out of the bottom on a flexible plastic arm and is held to the camera by a magnet when not extended. On screen control for recording, deleting and playing clips is completely intuitive.

The battery charges via USB in two hours, or three if you are using the Vado as a mounted drive on your computer.

Battery life will last long enough to fill up the internal memory which holds 1 hr in HQ (640×480) or 2hrs in SQ (320×240) both record at 30fps.

The LCD Screen is actually rather nice, its 2 inches and displays a full 640×480 image. One of the biggest selling points to me is the fact that the Vado has a standard tripod mount on the base. So combine one of these cameras with a Gorillapod and you have a cheap(ish) ‘stunt camera’ to attach to a car, bike  etc.

Possible downsides, well as expected there is no Image Stabilisation and apparently the inbuilt software (which is supposed to automatically upload clips to youtube) doesn’t work with a Mac. Splash or water-proofing would be a good idea, but it looks like it would resist the odd raindrop to me. The Youtube thing doesn’t bother me as I’ll be dragging/dropping and transcoding all my clips though Visualhub first anyway and then integrating them with the rest of my edited holiday footage.

The other year I went on a Wave-Runner (jet ski type thing) and took one of the Oregon Scientific ATC2K waterproof cameras with me.

Unfortunately when I got back home and put the SD card in the PC I found that the camera had been pointing in the wrong direction for much of the time so most shots were just sea rushing past. Therefore to me, a viewfinder or LCD screen is essential for one of these devices. Incidentally a friend later borrowed my ATC2K and attached it to his Motorcycle forks and it wasn’t long before its plastic custom mounting system snapped off (it doesn’t use a standard tripod screw).

You might think, why not just use your mobile phone camera instead, and that’s a fair point – but you might not want to drop your phone over the side of a boat any more than you’d want to drop a camcorder, and its pretty unlikely that it can be easily attached to a tripod mount.

Anyway, HERE IS A TEST CLIP taken with the Vado that I’ve uploaded on Vimeo (and HERE IS THE ORIGINAL FILE to download). I tried putting it on youtube, but it looks dreadful on there for some reason (perhaps it didn’t like their transcoding techniques). I’m pretty impressed with its wide(ish) angle lens and decent low light performance – the indoor section of the clip is in the Printworks in Manchester and it is really pretty dark in there, the camera picked up more than my naked eye could see.

So overall – very recommended. Currently only available via DSG (Dixons Stores Group) in the UK for around £79.99 . Dixons.com is £4.95 cheaper than PC World (if you can find a way to get free postage) because for some reason Dixons is selling the Silver model cheaper than the pink one at the moment which might be a pricing error. This is top end of what these devices are worth – I think £50-£60 would make this an irresistible proposition.