New Toys

A few weeks ago Jen and I were having a conversation about potentially purchasing a new video camera for our trip to China. It is extremely important to us to get as much of our trip on video as possible (especially the moment when we first meet Grace) as we will miss the first 6 to 12 months of her life. We have a 10 year old video camera that is kind of a pain to use since you need to recharge the batteries and it is kind of big to be carrying around. We want to try to travel as light as possible. It also uses tapes which we can only play on a VCR and we don't even use a VCR anymore. The new HD camcorders are nice but pretty expensive and with all of the costs for the trip to China we didn't want to purchase a new $1000 camcorder right now. So we were kind of going back and forth about buying a new expensive one or using the one we have. Then as we were watching TV the other night we saw a commercial for the Flip Camcorder.

We read some good reviews for it and decided to give it a try. It came today and this thing is pretty cool. It is about the size of a deck of cards, runs on 2 AA batteries, it records an hour of video and can easily be uploaded to a PC and burned to DVD. You can also just bring it to CVS and they will burn a DVD for you. Some of the lower priced camcorders only work well outside when it is really bright but this seems to work well in low light settings. Best of all, it was only $119 for the 60 minute version or $99.99 for the 30 minute version. We have been playing around with it and the video quality is pretty good even on our 53" TV. It is also very easy to use, no need to read a thick manual, there are just a couple buttons for power, play, delete and zoom. I think this is going to be a great low cost solution for us for the trip to China. I have linked a sample funny video below of Lucy jumping the invisible fence that we took today. This is something she does whenever she walks out of our office, we are not sure why.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=Eb2e5UDLNI0