*Words of Wisdom From The Elder

Several months ago I acquired a new video camera, the Aiptek HD 1080P.  If you aren’t familiar with this brand, don’t feel bad as I wasn’t either until a little over a year or so ago.  I haven’t owned a video camera in a long time and I honestly didn’t want to spend much on one knowing how little I would wind up using it.  The Aiptek fit perfectly into my price range and the features, well, they just can’t be beat for the price.

For starters, yes you read that correctly, this camera does 1080P.  Here are some specs that may be of interest.

I use a 4GB SanDisk Ultra II card in the camera which provides about an hour of high definition 1080P recording.  The camera saves files onto the memory stick in .MOV format (Quicktime).  This is good and bad.  It is good because you can drag the files directly to the computer and start playing them.  Some cameras have proprietary formats that force you to encode them which takes time.  The bad about having the video in .MOV format is it makes editing video really hard on Windows.  Movie Maker doesn’t support the .MOV format and I have had a hard time trying to figure out what to use to do editing.  As a matter of fact, I’m still trying to figure it out.

The video the camera takes really good video if there is good lighting.  It is horrible at night, don’t even try.  Thus, you wouldn’t want to take this to a night football game or soccer game.  If you have kids in sports, you should probably buy something else.  It is very portable and I have found it fits really good in my back pocket. 

One day I’ll produce some real video I’ve taken with the camera, but until then you’ll have to settle for “Deer in the backyard” to see a sample of the camera’s quality.  I shot this right before lunch today when I heard the dogs barking.  There are two fawns in the back yard wandering around.

This video was shot and the .MOV file transferred to my computer and then uploaded to Viddler (which has better quality than YouTube).  Nothing was done to it.  It should give you a good sample of the camera’s quality.

If you are looking for an economical camera that is cheap and records great video in good light this one may need to be on your list.