Supreme usefulness, great battery life, great reliability with heavy use

I've had my flip video F260 for many years now, about 3.5 years.
It has always been 100% reliable. People saying that it isn't reliable don't know what they are talking about. It's been my car's full time rear dash cam for over a year, being used quite a bit. Also, it endures hot summers. Thanksfully this camcorder does not have a thermal sensor, so it won't shut off no matter how hot it gets. So it records for the long haul. All these new pocket camcorders have annoying thermal sensors to protect against exploding batteries.
I am a college student and it has recorded every lecture of most of the classes I've been in over the years, pointed at the ceiling for audio.

It also has been dropped a few times. When you tap the top of the camcorder heavily, the camcorder will immediately lose power as if you had removed a battery while it was on. You can just slide the power button and it will turn back on though. I wonder if there is an internal short going on that is causing that or something. Not a big deal though, has hardly ever happened unless I dropped the camcorder.

It records in 480p resolution, XVID encoded inside of an avi container file. Bitrate is usually around 2.5Mb/s to 3.5Mb/s. If the camcorder is staring at a wall, it is more like 1.15Mb/s.
By having it stare at a wall or ceiling, you can record audio for hours and hours with the onboard 2GB of storage memory. About 4 hours at the most. This is very useful for me as a student, recording lecture audio.

Audio quality is 44.1KHZ sampling rate, 16-bit mono ACPCM 176Kb/s fixed bitrate. The audio is quite decent but not nearly as good as a VPC-PD2 stereo microphoned camcorder.

This flip video camcorder is quite energy efficient. It only takes about 1.5 watts when recording. Thanks to this, and that it takes AA batteries, and with modern high end rechargeable NiMH batteries, you can get 3.5 hours out of a charge! 4 hours if you give the batteries a break. I realize that a lot of the bulk of the device is because of the batteries but that is a good thing. The battery life is awesome, it's like having a 25 gallon gas tank in a Civic. Also the flip video can stand by itself because of the thickness at the bottom. A good feature.

Modern HD pocket camcorders tend to take more like 3 watts, and they use these dinky little lithium ion polymer batteries that just have as much energy as 1 good rechargeable AA, so they only last about an hour per charge.

Use quality NiMH rechargeable batteries, don't use the crappy battery pack that flip video made, not much capacity. Use Powerex 2700mAh or Sanyo XX NiMH batteries for best results. They should last for years if you use a good slow charging charger with individual battery circuits.

Overall I give the flip video a 4 out of 5 for it's reliability, big battery slots and good usefulness. It does it's purpose very well, as a basic simple camcorder that doesn't have much that can go wrong. The 1 thing I wished it had was bitrate configuration options so I could increase the quality because video quality isn't very good because of the compression. It isn't bad though.
No, it doesn't have optical zoom, optical flash (or take pictures at all for that matter), or stereo microphones or HD resolution but it is good for what it is.

Love Flips; easy to use, easy to upload, easy to trim, easy to extract pics

This is a sweet little camera, and like all Flip cameras, is extremely easy to use. It records up to an hour of 30 fps video, HD (high definition.) This means the image and sound are both really good quality. I got mine used on ebay very inexpensively and am pleased with its performance. It zooms only 2x, but for some things like family events that's usually all you need. It takes 2 AA batteries and is programmed with an internal memory; you don't put an SD card in it. All Flips plug into your USB port and the videos upload to the Flip program on your computer, which installs immediately when you plug it in for the first time. This is where you save, trim, save still images from your video clips, transfer to other files if you wish. The program will even allow you to import certain other non-Flip video recordings. If you export your Flip video clips to other files on your computer, then your other video editing programs can tweak them up. I have Windows Live Movie Maker (comes with my Windows 7 OS - operating system) and I'm able to attach captions right on the video and do other neat stuff if I choose.

I have other Flip cameras: U2120 (2 hrs., 8 GB, 30 fps), U32120 (2 hrs., 8 GB, 60 fps), U1120 (2 hrs., 4 GB, 30 fps) and like them all a lot. With this F260, sometimes an hour limit on your camera is all you need, especially if you record short clips and are usually near your computer to upload right away. Another benefit is that with good batteries, you should get to a full hour without it conking out on you. One negative note, on the batteries not the camera: the Flip brand battery packs you would use for this F260 camera (the equivalent of 2 AAs), are very wallet draining because they wear out so fast from recharging -- via the USB port -- and reusing. You might as well buy and discard regular AAs, or buy good quality rechargeables, which you would have to charge on a separate charger. Because this uses AAs there are many other better options than the Flip battery pack. I spent a fortune on multiple Flip brand AA battery packs and won't go down that road any more.

amazing small camera to record and great money for the value

i love flip cameras they dont last too long but you get what you paid for. amazing camera looks great on the tv, youtube clear sound. really would recomend it for someone who loves to make youtube videos or even just small vacations or the great family moments you want to capture. I have bought $200 dollars cameras and they have not worked at all like that flip camera. they have been small handy cameras easy to download to your computer and simple. they work great.

Needed for the online college class I was taking.

Bought Camera for an online classs and it is an average product for the cost, but we have no other camera to compare it to.