Creative Vado HD

Last year we reviewed Creative's original Vado pocket camcorder and concluded that it was fine for fooling around and very easy to use, but unsurprisingly not up to the standards of more expensive devices.

A year or so on and the company has come up with a successor, at a price more than double that of the original. The reason for that is that this one records in high definition. The Vado HD is pretty much as small, physically, as the original Vado, but this one has a lens that protrudes slightly from the body (just under a centimetre).

The 4GB of internal memory for storing video has been doubled but the controls remain the same: record and play/pause buttons and another for deleting clips, plus a four-way pad that's used to control playback and to zoom in and out.

The 2in screen on the rear can be used to play back recordings, but when the Vado is plugged into a Windows PC's USB socket you can run the Creative viewer software directly as it's loaded on the camcorder itself. Handily, the USB connector flips out from the bottom of the camera, and it comes with a cable to connect it to the HDMI socket on high-definition television sets.

Quality was much better than from the original Vado. It records in a resolution of 1,280x720 pixels, which is indeed high definition, and colour reproduction and brightness in recorded videos were impressive.

The test videos we shot, though, were not quite up to what you'll get by spending a bit more – for instance the Sanyo HD2000, also on this page. Jagged edges and jerky movement mean that while the Vado HD is fine when quality is not a priority, we wouldn't use it to shoot something important such as a wedding.

In the same vein, the Vado HD's two closest competitors are the Kodak Zi6 and the Toshiba Camileo, which are cheaper by £50 and £40 respectively, and both shoot video as well and in the same resolution as the Vado HD.

It's not a bad camera and its style and good build quality appeal, but at full price it's not a great deal.