Toshiba Camileo Clip review

The Toshiba Camileo Clip is roughly the size of a matchbox and weighs little more. Its 1.5 inch screen is ensconced within a large plastic clip that lets you attach it to your belt or jacket pocket while you’re walking around. Its rubbery casing also makes it splash and shock proof, which means you don’t have to worry about it much. This gives you the confidence to use the Camileo Clip in environments where you otherwise wouldn’t use a camcorder, such as rowdy parties and outdoors during a British winter.

Despite its size, the Camileo Clip is no VGA webcam. It can shoot in 1080p Full HD at 30 frames per second or 720p at 30 or 60 frames per second. Should you wish, you can also record video in 480p at 30fps. In common with regular camcorders, you can also take still images, and the Camileo Clip can shoot 16-megapixel stills should you just want to take a quick snap – although the sensor has only five megapixels, and so the higher quality settings are simply interpolating the extra data to no real effect.

Unsurprisingly at this price, the Clip only has 128MB of internal storage, so you’ll need a microSD card in order to record any appreciable amount of video – 128MB only provides enough storage for around 46 seconds of Full HD footage. Thankfully a 16GB micro SD card only costs around £6 these days and you’ll get about four hours of footage on that.

The Camileo Clip has a battery life of one hour and six minutes. This doesn’t sound a lot of recording time, but should be enough if you’re just shooting small segments of an event. The battery is sealed within the Clip’s case, so you can’t take replacement batteries out with you, but this isn’t the kind of camcorder for which you’d want to carry spare batteries anyway. It’s a fun, party camcorder.

As for video quality, we were unimpressed by its image stabilization, especially when moving forward. There was also a lot of flicker when panning. Noise was prevalent whether in lit rooms or dark environments, and image compression contributed a budget appearance to the Clip’s footage. Still, it’s hard to criticise the £60 Clip for these faults, and its footage is plenty good enough for the price. Similarly, the Clip’s still images suffered from compression and some sections of our photos were blurry, and had patchy focus and a lack of detail.

Sadly, the Clip has no optical zoom, just a 10x digital zoom. We didn’t have to zoom too far for the footage to suffer from the blurring and digital artefacting of the digital zoom, so it’s best to leave this function alone and crop the video later in editing if you really need to.

The Clip’s controls are a little fiddly to operate. The record button and menu button are easy enough to use, but its four directional buttons are so small and spongy, and none of them provide any real feedback, such as a solid click, when you press them. Navigating the Clip’s menus is fairly straightforward, but you can only see one menu option at a time, so it takes some time to become fully acquainted with all the options in a sub-menu.

Happily, the Clip has numerous features to support your video-making, such as motion detect, face tracking, slow motion, pre-record, time lapse, continuous play, and voice recording, as well as standard scene effects, white balance and colour filters, and it also comes with two DVDs containing a Plus Trial of Video Deluxe MX, and a user manual and instruction guide. Many of the features are no more complex than a toggle switch, but it’s nice to have them, and the desktop software is a bonus.

A neat feature of the Clip is its double function as a webcam. We think it works well as a webcam, although it’s a little expensive if you only use it for that one purpose. You can find cheaper options elsewhere, such as the £15 Logitech HD Webcam C270. There’s a mini USB port and mini HDMI port provided for outputting data and video.

The Toshiba Camileo Clip is a neat gadget, but other than a higher resolution, it’s difficult to see why you’d want to use it instead of your smartphone. Plus, a lot of smartphones now record video in 720p or 1080p. For that reason, we think it’s best suited to those who don’t want to take an expensive smartphone to a party or other rough-and-tumble environment.