Vado HD 3rd Gen (Red) Refurbished Review

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(More customer reviews)For a little more than half a hundred, I'd rate this a great buy. Video quality is passable, the option to attach an external microphone is quite welcome, because the internal microphone is only so-so at best. The choice of recording format is welcome, as it can be easily played on pretty much any platform. It is a refurb, so it might have some minor cosmetic defects (mine has small smudges and scratches on the plastic of the camera side), but it came with no missing cables or parts. The battery seems new, and charged up just fine.
The plastic, although glossy and fingerprinty, feels good in the hand. It has rounded corners, so no uncomfortable edges. The product might end up looking ugly until wiped, but the videos will always be so-so to decent quality, so I'm fine with that. Besides, I've only checked the videos on a computer monitor. I expect the videos to look better on the TV, if only due to viewing distance.
Adding a tripod mount was a little unexpected, but very welcome. I admit the Vado did get a few chuckles when mounted on a large tripod. Still, functionality over appearances.
In my use so far, the controls are the biggest annoyance. My Vado doesn't seem to want to stay in quick charge mode, but I'm not really in a rush. An A/C adapter would have been welcome, but devices that charge off USB ports are not uncommon now, unfortunately. So the controls are the reason I took off 1 star, as every other shortcoming was expected for a product of this nature and price.
An SD card would have been welcome, but I don't consider it a dealbreaker. I don't anticipate using this camera to record any serious events, so it will just take a few minutes of video at a time. On HD+ mode, it has just over 1 hour of recording time, and on HD mode, I believe recording time is extended to 2 hours. This is good enough for my purposes.
And finally, although possible, I don't think this camera was intended to take footage for editing. The video it takes is already compressed pretty aggressively, since it only has 4 GB of storage. So I can't knock it for this reason.

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