Extreme sports trinket: Samsung Miniket

By Chris Stevens on 24 November 2005, 11:31am

Wax down your snowboard and vaseline your forehead, slip the Miniket's headband over your skullbox and prepare to record your descent down Delirium Dive. Fans of Peepshow will love this camcorder, as it captures a first-person perspective over your life -- what you see, this camcorder sees, via a small head-mounted lens.

Specially designed for extreme-sports fans, the Miniket VP-X110L uses a tiny internal 1GB flash card to store video footage, expandable with Memory Stick PRO cards. Video is shot in MPEG-4 format at a resolution of 720x576 pixels. If things get bumpy in the middle of your 720, there's built-in image stabilisation to even out the fracas. Anyone who's wiped out on a snowboard will know that you, and everything you're holding, gets punched by an angry man made of snow. For this reason, the Miniket is moisture and 'weather' proof -- which covers just about everything, doesn't it?

The 800,000-pixel CCD inside the Miniket matches what we've seen from much, much bigger camcorders. It's hard to believe, but the £400 VP-X110L is the same size as a pack of playing cards. Expect a full review imminently. -CS