MacWorld reviews Creative Vado HD

"Like other pocket camcorders, the Vado HD lacks image stabilization and an optical zoom (it has a 2x digital zoom) and offers no control over white- or color balance. It has 8GB of flash memory and a proprietary removable battery. Like other pocket camcorders it features a single record button and a four-position switch for zooming, adjusting volume, and navigating from one saved clip to another. It also has Play/Pause and Delete buttons on the back of the camera. The 2-inch (measured diagonally) LCD serves as both the viewfinder and the playback screen. The Vado bears a USB connector at the bottom of the camera, a microphone in the front, and a speaker in the back. It includes not only the expected composite video port for connecting the camera to a TV, but also an HDMI port—a feature unique to the Vado. (The HDMI cable is included, but a composite cable isn't.) "

Buy a Creative Labs Vado HD 720p Pocket Video Camcorder with 8 GB Video Storage and 2x Digital Zoom (Black)

Read the full article at MacWorld.

In Search for the Perfect Social Media Video Camera

David Berlind from InformationWeek has an interesting post about the available options and questions raised by the appearance of the smaller HD camcorders.
He also posts his thoughts on Mac iSight cameras, USB and FireWire connectivity, productivity and ease of use.

From the article:

Thanks to the speed of USB 2.0, the majority of the new cameras hitting the market today have eschewed Firewire (IEEE 1394) ports for connecting to PCs. This makes life difficult given where we want to go with video and social media because we're currently looking at two configurations where Firewire comes in handy. One is live streaming using solutions Kyte.TV and Ustream.com for some some of our big events like Interop. The other is capturing video directly into our MacBooks using Quicktime.

In both cases, we want cameras with decent optics whose live video can be routed directly into the MacBooks. In the case of the latter, we've tried using the MacBook's built-in iSight camera but somewhere between the middle of last year and today, all of our MacBook's decided to start imitating old martial arts movies.

Read full post here.