Creative, the company generally best known for it’s PC cards, has produced the Voda, a nice little competitor to the Flip, the low-end, low-price camcorder from Pure Digital. Up until now, the Flip had pretty much cornered the market on low-end, economy-class video cameras (even though it’s Pure Digital is fairly new to the business). With it’s simple features and easy-to-use controls, it’s been a hit amongst the “I just want a video camera that works” crowd.
Originally, the Flip was just a more commercialized version of a “single-use” camera sold at drug stores like Rite-Aid and CVS. Hackers proved that the single-use camera could have a market without the user being forced to bring it back to said drug stores for processing onto a DVD. So, Pure Digital, essentially, created a sub-genre for camcorders, doing for portable video shooting what the OLPC XO laptop did for UMPCs. Since then, the Flip has taken on nearly iPodian significance in the world of low-end cams.
Now it’s time for that iPod-like dominance to be challenged, because here comes the Creative Voda.
It features many of the same abilities the Flip has. It’s got the pop-out USB plug and comes with un-expandable internal memory–both, just like the Flip. The Voda also comes with 2 gigs of storage and can shoot in 640 x 480 resolution. Battery life is a reasonable-for-the-quality 2 hours and comes in both silver and hot pink.
The thing that is odd about this craze for cheap, low-end palm-sized camcorders is that most low-end still-cameras shoot video, too. The other catch is that most of these low-end still-cams will run your bank account roughly the same price as both the Flip and Creative’s new Voda. So, if you don’t like the idea of convergence and want to embrace the newcomer, check out the Voda and see what you think.
Of course, don’t expect HD from either cam. Any camera that shoots hi-def that would be this small would also sport a bigger price tag.
