I’ve gone back and forth over whether to add some way of shooting video on the upcoming trip to Mongolia. I looked at “real” camcorders and finally decided that another $600 and hauling a third thing that is bigger than a Nikon just wasn’t in the cards. But I was very skeptical of the little Flip camcorders. Many times it’s better to skip something rather than settle for the minimum and then just be frustrated.

But I’ve watched a couple of people use them and saw how compact and light they are. Hummm. I went to Amazon over the weekend and poked around. The second generation of Flips are out and the price was too good to pass up, so, for $129 I got a Flip UltraHD and I have to say, I’m really impressed. Here’s my first ever video that I shot last night, all nine seconds of it:

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I’ve already learned one thing and that is to let the subject go all the way out of the frame before stopping the shot.

This Flip will shoot 120 minutes of video and has 8gb of built in memory. It has a flip-out USB port that plugs into your computer. I also got the rechargeable battery pack and the padded case. The case was returned today. It was a $15 rip-off. Cheesy and no way to even get the camera in it since it was effectively sewn shut.

I have no idea what kind of wildlife footage I’ll get since there’s really no zoom to speak of, but for the national Nadaam events, especially the horse-racing, and domestic animals like the horses and camels, it will be interesting to have images of moving animals to work from when I get home instead of only stills. It’ll all be a big experiment and a fun one.