Creative's VADO camera for video blogging

It is becoming more popular all the time to embed video links in blogs. Creative's VADO camera is a great tool for when you want to do interviews, product demonstrations, share an experience, show off a talent or just vent your frustrations. It is also a wonderful tool for documenting instances of police abuse, terrorist attacks, candidate faux pax's and campaign promises (so you can hold them accountable on YouTube at a later date). Won't that be fun?

Use it to record your classes at school or what is on the bulletin board, so you can review it another time. Film your favorite rock band and share with your friends. Send friends that recording from the family vacation and all the wonderful sites you visited (the giant ball of string and the armadillo-shaped eatery your Dad just had to stop at), plus the map zoom-in of the route you took, proving that you really were in the very center of nowhere. You are limited only by your imagination. However, having said that, I would recommend using a higher quality camera to record such important things as baby's birth, first steps and first word, the graduation ceremonies, etc. You will always wish you had, if you don't. Other than that, it is a great buy and decent quality.



CAUTION: It is also a quite effective tool for verifying your personal I.Q. level. In the few minutes or hours that you take to develop remorse and remove the link, there can be long-lasting consequences from the subsequent downloads and sharing of your file--worldwide!

SPECS:

The VADO camera from Creative is quite an impressive piece of equipment. About the size of a cell phone, it is USB rechargeable, records up to two hours of video (having 2 Gb of built-in flash memory) in 640x480 resolution, on a 2" anti-glare screen, and is great for immediate uploads to your computer, YouTube or PhotoBucket by way of the built-in software, which takes over automatically when you plug into the USB port using the swivel-out USB adapter built into the camera.

The MPEG-4 format allows commonly available editing software to handle the task of cleaning up and polishing before you upload the final rendition to the Net. (See CAUTION above). Other features include a 2X zoom, good low-light performance and one-touch record.


Cost? For approximately $100, you can get the device in pink or silver, with a carrying case for about $15, extra battery packs for around $15, the charging cradle for $30, and an AV-out cable for approximately $10. The VADO also happily works with the Mac OS X 10.4.11 or later system and the most recent Windows PCs. All in all, this is destined to be one popular camera, I would guess. A fine tool, inexpensive for the niche it was intended to fill.