No one has had a problem handling my Sony high8, and its video has very good resolution. I hope it lasts a long time. In the meantime I’ll be searching for a stand-alone analog-to-digital converter. If I can’t find that I’ll just use my DVD copier and do the limited editing it is capable of.
Rating: 2 / 5

When I researched this camera, no where, and I mean no where, was it mentioned that the video from the MiniDV could only be transferred via Firewire. I might not have bought it if I had known that. Now I have to return it and fight to not pay a restocking fee.

Btw, the manual shows that you can use a USB cable, but it doesn’t even say that video from the MiniDV cassette can not be transferred over USB.

Oh, and no video editing software? For $1000, Canon couldn’t put something on the DVD. Sure, I can use Microsoft Movie Maker, but I can’t say that I like it.
Rating: 1 / 5

First and foremost, this is billed as a pen-sized video camera. It does indeed record video, at a reasonable resolution and frame rate, up to 100 minutes worth. It’s easy to work with, just set the mode, turn on the power and start recording. The audio on the recorded video is loud and clear, but the video itself is very grainy and not of the best quality. Worse, zooming in and out is not smooth AT ALL, being very jumpy and erratic. There is a light that can be turned on to enhance the light balance when recording but it is not enough to rescue the otherwise poor quality. On the plus side, there seems to be some adjustment for jitter built-in so that video recording is not too susceptible to slight movements.

The 5MP camera is very limited in capability. You can turn the flash on and off, zoom in and out, and snap pictures. There are no other adjustments and settings that can be made to improve the picture quality and as a result it is easy to take bad pictures. In fact, my cell phone’s 2MP camera is better at taking decent pictures, and that says quite a lot.

The one redeeming feature of this device is the MP3 player. It does a nice job of audio playback, with decent sound quality and volume control. With 4GB memory it can hold quite a bit of music and audio.

There is no documentation with this device, at all. The print on the box is as close as you will get to having documentation, which is a terrible oversight. It is not good enough to assume that users will automatically know how to use this device, even though it is relatively straightforward. Several things about this gadget are learned through trial and error for the less electronically inclined.

*** UPDATE 11-29-2009: I was told that a mini CD with the manual should come with the gadget. Mine did not. I hope I am an isolated exception. . .

The screen is actually the biggest complaint I have about this device. It is small in the interest of keeping the overall device small, but it is so small as to be hard to see for some people. I struggle with seeing the image on the screen, and that’s a deterrent for using it.

Another unfortunate design decision is that, in order to hear audio at all, you have to use headphones (this device includes a pair of ear buds in the package). Every other video device I have ever used that allows playback has a speaker, but this one does not. If out and about and you need to review your recordings, take the ear buds with you.

The very best feature of this gadget is the included software that installs when you plug it into a USB port of your computer. Installation takes some time but once installed it is very intuitive, responsive and seems to have packed a lot of features for interacting with the device (sending and receiving). It also facilitates interacting with YouTube so uploads are made easy.

Included in the package are all of the cables needed to interact with the gadget.

The AipTek PenCam Trio HD is a small device trying to be a video camera, digital camera and MP3 player all rolled into one unit. Unfortunately it does not work so well when it comes to its visual functions and actually underperforms some cell phones in these areas. Though a useful tool when on the go and an interesting gift idea, this gadget should be viewed as a starter unit at best and a toy at worst.
Rating: 3 / 5

Fifty years later, you can buy a pen cam. While it is actually a bit bigger than the Minox spy cam of days gone by, iIt does exactly what it promises, with no need to take film to a lab. It is a 5MP still cam, a 720p HD video cam and an MP3 player. Picture quality is excellent as is the video. Playing MP3’s the pen cam has more than acceptable sound reproduction.

So why did I give this product 3 stars and not 4 or 5? The answer is that it is a dedicated tool in that it does three things and three things only. Any smartphone these days do the same three things and a lot more. The 4GB storage capacity is acceptable but my iPhone 3GS has 32GBs. It has a 3 MP camera, a video camera (though not HD or with a zoom), and plays my entire MP3 collection (about 20GBs). It also has a bar code laser scanner, an Amazon Kindle, a turn by turn GPS system, and room for lots and lots of applications.

So if you need 5MP, 720p HD video and have no need for a cell phone or storage of lots of music, this is a product you should consider. Otherwise look into a new smartphone as an alternative.
Rating: 3 / 5

One thing that irked me right off the bat was the excessive packaging this thing has. There is an abundance of thin, clear plastic and then even more hard thin clear plastic you must cut through just to get the device out of it’s prison – not environmentally friendly and especially not human friendly at all. Normally, I would not make a big deal of this, but the PenCam was packaged far too excessively for me to let it slip by unmentioned.

After you manange to free the unit from the terrible packaging, you’ll notice that it’s pretty small. It’s about the size of a (very) large (maybe double-wide) highlighter pen. It’s also very light. This is because the unit is made almost entirely of plastic and a metal that may be aluminum. The lens is of the fixed-focus variety and is similar in size and quality to lenses used on cheap camera phones. The lens has no image stabilization and no optical zoom. There is a small but bright white single LED light which can be used in low light conditions to light nearby objects or as a weak flash for taking still images (just like some camera phones have). There is also a tiny mirror which can be used to line up self portraits and a hole for the microphone. The side with the lens is dominated by a large and rather useless plastic clip that is not meant to be removed.

The controls consist of a flimsy four-way directional controller located just above three buttons for playback, recording and deleting. The tactile response of the four-way controller can only be described as *spongy*. Very often times you’ll press it to activate the digital zoom or the light and the unit won’t respond because you’re not pressing quite hard enough. There is an LED ajacent to the left side of the four-way controller that lights up solid blue when the unit is powered on, blinks blue when recording and is red when charging. There is the tiny, literally postage-stamp sized, allegedly OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode) screen that is of the wrong aspect ratio for displaying HD video – in fact it’s perfectly square, measuring 3/4″ x 3/4″. It simply displays the center of what the camera will record or playback, you lose the right and left sides. The screen is also not very clear and the brightness level of the screen is fixed. I have a hard time believing it’s OLED as it is nothing like the truly *excellent* AMOLED screen on my Cowon S9.

Along the right side there is the power button and a difficult to move sliding switch which puts the device into video, still camera or audio playback mode. Along the left side, there is a mini-hdmi port, a headphone jack and a mini-usb 2. 0 port. It made me laugh, but there is a standard tripod mount on the bottom. The unit comes with a mini-usb to usb cable, a mini-hdmi to hdmi cable, composite av cables, cheap earbuds, a screen hood/camera stand that reeks of what I can only describe as a toxic burning smell, an armband (an armband? why?) and a lanyard.

Let’s get down to business. . . the primary job of a camcorder is to record video. Press the power button and the unit starts up and is ready to shoot video in about eight seconds. Simply aim the thing and press the red record button to record. The PenCam Trio records what they call 1280×720P HD video to an mp4 file format. I say it that way because many times the video it takes is not even recorded at 30 FPS no less the 60 FPS which is what the 720P HD video specification calls for. If the lighting conditions are not seriously bright (i. e. outdoors on a bright, sunny day), the recording speed drops down to a mere 15 FPS resulting in very jerky, unsmooth video. Even in bright conditions, the video it takes is not very sharp, not very clean and not very smooth. Since there is no form of image stabilization, and the PenCam is so light and small, you must hold the device still or make very purposeful slow movements or there will be a ton of shake and jitter in the recorded video – it’s almost impossible to avoid. And when there is a lot of motion, there is a lot of blocky, compression artifacts in the recorded video. Another issue is that there is no manual setting for white balance and it does a terrible job setting it automatically, so almost all video taken indoors will have some form of bad color cast to it. For that matter, there are no manual controls for anything. There is a “digital” zoom which is activated by pressing the four way controller either up or down to zoom in or out while recording. Unfortunately, the zoom is jerky and it may not even activate when you want it thanks to the spongy four-way controller. The video light is toggled by pressing the controller to the right. I was surprised at how bright that light was. At least the PenCam can be used as a pseudo flashlight if nothing else.

Plugging the device into my PC, it shows up as two removable mass storage devices. The video files are in H. 264 mp4 format with a “. mov” extension, ala quicktime (should be . mp4 but who cares at this point). I was able to play them back using VLC (see videolan dot org) and in Windows Media Player with the CoreAVC H. 264 codec. The video could not be described as sharp, not well exposed, was full of motion compression artifacting, had the wrong white balance 90% of the time and was shaking all over the place since there is no image stabilization and very often dropped to 15 FPS when lighting was not *ideal*. In my initial trials I took about fifteen videos and one of them would not play back in any program. . . not confidence inspiring. At least plugging it into and removing it from my PC was hassle free.

The built-in rechargeable battery is not replaceable and charges only when you plug the unit into your PC in an “off” state. If the unit is on when you plug it into your PC, it will not charge the battery, it will mount the drives. It cannot do both at the same time. Battery life seems like it may be on par with the 100 minute recording time. My initial estimate is that you may get approximately an hour and a half to two hours of recording/standby time on a full charge.

I have not yet used the unit for taking stills or audio playback. Even still, I can tell you that the audio playback will be extremely basic with only a volume control and no support for much else. I’ve also not used the HDMI out, though I don’t expect much.

To top it all off, my PenCam has a defect in the form of a visible bubble in the outer lens that shows up nicely in the recorded video. If this were a high quality device, this defect would likely never have made it passed Q/C.

Overall, I just cannot recommend the PenCam, especially anywhere near its current price of a buck fifty. You can do much better at a similar price point or if you spend just a bit more. . . A LOT better. For instance, for a little more than this, you could get a Canon PowerShot SD780IS 12. 1 MP Digital Camera which is compact, light, easy to use, has excellent build quality, Canon quality lenses with a 3x optical zoom, optical image stabilization and a 2. 5″ lcd screen that takes absolutely killer, high quality still images and excellent quality 720P HD video! So unless you are looking for a very small camcorder that takes low quality video or something that you could give to your kids and have no concerns of them destroying something expensive, the Aiptek PenCam Trio HD is not the camcorder for you.

Rating: 2 / 5

Unfortunately the Aiptek HD is a terrible product. Despite supposedly being HD the video and still picture quality is very poor – significantly worse than the non-HD Flip we own (how can it possibly be considered HD ?!?!?) The system is not as intuitive as the Flip. It’s not super complicated with a multitude of buttons or switches or anything like that, but it just doesn’t have obvious controls for the still camera and some of the buttons I thought would be for one function turned out to be for another.

The view screen size when taking video shots is quite small – about 1 inch square, whereas the view screen on the Flip is about 1 1/2 inches by 1 1/4 inch (doesn’t sound that much bigger, but believe me it makes a big difference. ) The advert says the Aiptek is “about the size of a highlighter pen” – absolutely not. Perhaps two highlighter pens side by side, but not one (I believe another reviewer made this same observation and a similar comparison to the Flip as well). The Flip is about 1/2″ wider, but is also about 1 1/2″ shorter and much thinner than the Aiptek as well. In my opinion there is no size advantage to the Aiptek for a pocket, purse or anything really.

Another advantage of the Flip is that the software for editing, sending etc. is very user friendly. Again, it is very intuitive and offers features that I just couldn’t readily find for the Aiptek (for example, you can take stills from your video on the flip using the software. I did not readily see a similar feature for the Aiptek at all).

The Aiptek manual (when I finally decided to try and look things up) didn’t offer much by way of instruction so wasn’t useful.

I didn’t bother with the MP3 feature as I honestly didn’t want to take the time to load on music when I already knew I was not a fan of the Aiptek as a whole.

All in all you’d be wasting your money to buy the Aiptek over the flip. While you might think the Aiptek would be great to have in order to avoid having a still camera and a video, the truth of the matter is that the image quality is so poor you’d end up buying new, separate units, anyways. Don’t waste your time or money on this.

The idea is great but unfortunately the product just does not deliver. Instead buy a Flip – you’ll be glad you did!

Rating: 2 / 5

But in reality, all of this is horribly flawed. The design is nice, though rather impractical. By making the camera look like a pen, they had to shrink the display down to a barely usable size. And even when you use the latest OLED screen, a tiny screen isn’t going to be any use.

The package itself is the only good part of this camera – you get a wrist strap, sun visor/stand, HDMI cable and more. Not bad for the price, but when you look at comparable products like the Kodak Zi8, you get better quality stuff, for the same price.

The internal rechargeable battery is a nice touch, but also means you will need to recharge on the road instead of using AA or AAA’s.

Sadly, the most important part of a video camera is where this camera fails the most. Video quality is just bad. It may record in HD resolution, but the results are jerky and colors are very poor. Still photos are no better – the quality is what you’d get from a cameraphone – so don’t expect this to replace your normal point and shoot camera on a trip.

The only real advantage of the Aiptek HD PenCam is its size. It is small enough for sports shots or adventure video, but you will need to be aware the quality will be lacking. If you really need something for good HD video, invest in something better, like a Flip, VadoHD or Kodak.

The fact that it also works as an MP3 player is a nice touch, but with only 4GB, you won’t be able to carry much music, plus any songs you use, will take away from time you can use for movies.

I hate to say “don’t buy it” in a review, because everyone has different needs and expectations, but this product really is one that may not be worth your money.
Rating: 3 / 5