I imagine a fair few of you will have noticed by now those cheap little video cameras cropping up that use solid state storage(onboard or memory card). They're usually cheapo no-name brands and priced at around $200 or less. I'm just courious about the quality of the video they provide. Don't get me wrong, I'm not expecting much. I was assuming the quality would be somewhere between mobile phone and the built in video feature on digital still cameras. Has anybody had any hands on experience with these things?

I'm not after top of the line video quality here, I'm just after something small, light and cheap to carry around everywhere. I wanna be able to stick it in my pocket and take it around on nights out, to parties or just film random cool s*** I see in the city during the working week. I figure something that's solid state is gonna be pretty hardy, have half decent battery life and if I break it, no dramas, they're cheap as chips.

hmmm...

you definately needed to stop checking id at the door.

quality is s***house.

we're talking like 0.4MP sensors usually, with hellishly compressed video. that sort of s***house....

Jesus... that's like, phone s***house.

I was having a fiddle with some of the digital cameras at work today (3MP, 5MP and 8MP) and they all looked pretty good. I might just put $300 into a digital still camera and buy a huge memory card and just use that.

Thanks for the info, Erik.

^^ just make sure there's no time limit on recording. I think mine might be limited to 60 seconds at a time or something. I've never really used the video function on it for long periods of time so can't confirm.