Sony synonymous with the Handycam brand is bringing a challenge to the dying Flip brand.  How could Sony make that challenge?  The Bloggie.  Sony’s Bloggie is a much prettier version of the Flip, attempting to pick up style points along with the actual technology put inside.  Why else would Sony put out such a nice camera?  Well the market calls for one and Sony hopes to fill that void.  So, we used the Sony Bloggie Touch while at Call of Duty: XP and here’s my review.

So first things first is design, the Sony Bloggie Touch is visually, a great product.  You can tell Sony had their team working hard on the outer-appearance,  the idea is to make the Bloggie a great accessory while being a great camera.  I can appreciate this, Sony seems to understand cameras like the Flip are used for momentary events, maybe recording your kids soccer game or something, either way they know you’ll be pulling it out at all random times, each time showing off a slick design.

But can it blend..and more importantly work well as a camera for $150?  The answer of course is YES and NO.  I’ll go into the specifics.  While yes, the Bloggie is a great camera it has certain times when I scream “WHY WOULD YOU ADD THAT?”  For example, you must record in landscape at all times or else suffer the consequences and by that I mean recording in portrait will lead you to end up with video looking like it was shot with an iPhone in portrait, that hit me as an odd ‘feature’.

One thing I did like and this specific to the Touch was that it has a ‘touch to focus’ function, this coming from a camera with no actual optical zoom, a feature that would’ve been welcomed on the Flip digital camera brands.  Tears of joy would’ve been an overreaction but smiles were made after discovering that feature.  Sure, its only effective to a certain degree but Sony tried and I appreciate that.  Audio did not leave the same effect, we tried out the Bloggie in the Call of Duty: XP press room behind the backdrop, we discovered it picks up a lot of background audio, specifically in the press room you could hear the faint music from the Call of Duty series, on the Bloggie it felt amplified, I was surprisingly disappointed with its audio.  The Flip UltraHD’s microphone held up better than then Bloggie’s during the Kanye West concert at the end of Day 2, on the Bloggie you could hear the audio crackling.

The Bloggie does feature to different types of HD recording, 720p and 1080p.  Overall video quality is smooth and looks great at native size. There’s no optical image stabilization on the Bloggie, which means photos taken indoors will most likely be noise and there’s no flash either. Outdoors, though, photos were great to look at, colors were picked up, definitely delivered. The Bloggie shoots JPEG images at 12, 8, or 2 megapixels, and all look good.  One little feature that was pretty darn cool was being able to take photos while recording video, nice idea.

Lets talk how you connect the Bloggie, it uses the same mechanism as the Flip Video camera, flip out USB which you use for transferring files and charging.  Very easy to unload the videos and pictures on my iMac via iPhoto.    Besides that, it does it job.

Overall, the Sony Bloggie beats out the Flip video camera.  I’ve met a lot of YouTubers that would disagree saying it’s hard to v-log with the Touch due to..well the touch screen, I feel that the Sony Bloggie Touch delivers to the average consumer in need of a budget camera.  While the Flip brings simplicity, the Bloggie brings quality along with visual grace compared to the Flip.  It’s just better.