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Small wonder compared

Ok, I was curious so I bought the Small wonder and the flip (FW160) to compare them side by side. The Small wonder does have the advantage of the SD card reader, plus the flip LCD. However, in dim lighting like around my house, the Small wonder has a pinkish/reddish look to the images (I tried two small wonders with same results). The Flip does do a better job in poor lit conditions color wise in my opinnion. You can see the small wonder gain up light more noticably when lighting gets darker, but the Flip did a smoother job at it and the image was brighter. The Flip also has a much brighter display that you can see much better outside. I wanted to keep the Small Wonder because of the adjustable LCD and the SD cards, but the resulting video with the red/pink tint in dim conditions was no good for me. But not all small wonder indoor video had the red cast, only with certain lighting conditions and it depended on what you subject was. People’s faces ended up with a sunburn look inside in certain light angles. Outdoors it did great. The Small wonder’s software was also a bit behind the Flip’s. The Flips allowed a larger video window for playing back the video, it was also just a bit more user friendly (better video making software with music). I will say that the Small wonder does a good job of updating firmware etc. One other thing about the Small wonder I liked was it’s usb connector was easier to connect to my PC because of it’s location. I still think the small wonder does a good job, I just think the flip is slightly better image quality wise. Ok, I plugged them both into two different TV’s. One was a small 20 inch and I will say they were both about the same (VHS quality was pretty good). You can notice that darker shots have artifacts/blocky but acceptable to me. I tried plugging them into a 50 inch plasma and must say the results are not too hot. While I could watch the videos, they were fairly poor (but this is probably expected for this type of mpeg4 camcorder). I plan to watch these videos on PC or smaller TV anyhow. I ended up keeping the Flip 60 minute version instead of the Small wonder.

Update (5/19/2012):

The featured review for this product, RCA EZ201 Small Wonder 60 Minute Point-and-Shoot Camcorder White Electronics May 24, 2007, was written by Tom Cat.

The average rating for this item is 3 out of 5 stars, according to 3 reviews.