Ever since the arrival of video phones a few years back, there has been an explosion in the number of videos posted every day on YouTube, but the Creative Vado HD is a neat inversion of this trend.  Although it looks like a smartphone, it's actually a small camcorder. 

Aimed firmly at bloggers, this new pocket camcorder combines HD quality video with a simple interface.  Things are kept as simple as possible thanks to a built-in USB cable and the software runs straight off the device without the need to install any extra applications on your computer.

Handling

Most features are controlled by just two buttons, one to switch the camera on and the other to start and stop recording.  A series of arrows allow you to navigate through the various menus and review your clips, and, of course, delete those that you're not happy with.  Videos start playing very quickly, and you can listen to the audio track thanks to the built-in speaker.

The outside of the camcorder is very well-designed, and Creative has clearly spent a lot of time thinking about how to make a truly portable camcorder.  The Vado HD will appeal to bloggers, journalists, designers and anybody else who isn't happy with the quality of the videos produced on a mobile phone, but need something more portable than a standard camcorder.

With mobility in mind, Creative even includes a silicone case to protect the Vado HD.  It's also very easy to get started, as there's no extra USB cable or CD full of software to install.  All of the drivers you'll need are already on the 8 GB flash memory, along with the Vado Central software that allows you to publish your content directly on YouTube (see right).

A USB connector folds out of the side of the camcorder allowing you to plug it straight into your computer, much like a memory stick.  This is a very elegant solution and one we'd like to see more often.


Image Quality

The Vado HD films in 720p, that is, at a resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels without interlacing, encoding your videos as an AVC using the H.264 codec.  With the 8 GB of flash memory on board, you can record around two hours of video.

Living up to its name, the Vado HD includes a HDMI output to get the most from your clips.  We were impressed by the quality of our clips when we played them back on a 32'' Full HD TV, despite a colour space that tends to be dominated by warmer tones (yellow and oranges).  Alternatively, there's also a composite video out if you have a non-HD TV.

Creative doesn't provide details about the nature of the lens, but based on the clips we watched, it's probably the equivalent of a 32 mm wide-angle lens on a 35 mm device.  The sensor struggles in low light, but that's entirely understandable given how small it is.  There's no optical zoom, and the 2x digital zoom is useless as it works by increasing the size of each pixel, drastically reducing quality as it does so.