As a tech reviewer, my pulse races whenever a product is introduced with superlatives attached. “Fastest.” “Smallest.” “Thinnest.” It makes my day; I’ve got my news angle built right in. So when Pure Digital says that its new 3.3-ounce Flip Mino HD ($230) is the world’s smallest, lightest and least-expensive high-definition camcorder, attention must be paid. That’s three superlatives in one.

The original Flip and its spinoffs, like the Flip Ultra and the even smaller, sweetly named Flip Mino (pronounced “minnow”), have spent two years shaking up the tech world. They’re little cellphone-size plastic boxes that make recording video one-button simple.

Bloggers and feature-counters have always spit on the Flip because it’s so shockingly stripped-down. What kind of self-respecting camcorder has no menus, no manual controls, no still photos, no video light, no flip-out screen, no lens cap, no removable memory card and no image stabiliser? There’s not even an actual zoom — only a 2X digital one that degrades your picture by blowing it up.

But evidently, the masses think differently — and they have flipped for the Flip, making it a megahit. Today, according to Pure Digital, the Flip has, if you can believe it, 30 per cent of the camcorder market. According to the consultants at Deloitte, Pure Digital’s revenue has grown 44,667 per cent in five years.

And it’s all because the camera is small, it’s cheap, it turns on in two seconds, and above all, it’s absolutely, positively idiot-proof. Three-year-olds and technophobic 90-year-olds alike master the thing in the first 10 seconds. But there was still one downside to the Flip: the video wasn’t as good as a real camcorder’s.

The low-light sensitivity is astonishing — you get clear, bright video in dim situations where ordinary camcorders would hunt for focus and produce useless grainy footage. But overall, the regular Flip’s video is a little soft — ever so slightly blurred. So when Pure Digital announced that it would be releasing a high-definition Flip, you might have been forgiven for assuming that it meant the sort of pseudo hi-def that’s all too common these days. Too many cameras and camcorders record enough pixels to qualify, technically, for the term high definition — and yet the video looks terrible

on playback, nothing like

what you’d see on a hi-def TV broadcast.

Basically, they’re cheating. Happily, the Mino HD does not cheat. It grabs really great-looking video. It’s not up to the quality of hi-def tape camcorders like the Canon HDV30. But especially when the light is good, the Mino’s video is incredibly crisp and the colors are true. Best of all, the Mino HD preserves its predecessor’s uncanny low-light abilities. The resulting scene actually looks brighter in the video than it does to your

naked eye.

The audio is good, too, even when you’re interviewing somebody who is 10 feet away. Clearly, there’s a lot of engineering mojo going on in this little machine’s video and microphone circuitry. (You can see and hear for yourself in this week’s Pogue video at nytimes.com/tech; I used the Flip HD to document my recent Geek Cruise to Italy, Greece, Turkey and Egypt.)

There’s only one physical button on the Flip — the big red Record button. All the other buttons are touch-sensitive spots that light up on the shiny black back panel only when relevant. For example, when you’re recording, + and – buttons appear to control the zoom. When playing back, a Trash icon appears so you can delete a clip. And so on. All of this helps the Mino HD live up to the Flip’s track record for simplicity.

Sure, a smaller camcorder is always more convenient than a bigger one, no matter what the event. But having a cellphone-size camera that records one hour of real 720-pixel high-definition video presents some new possibilities. You can attach this little Flip to your arm, handlebars or helmet when doing extreme sports (the company sells a connector for this purpose). People have duct-taped Flips to their dogs’ collars for a new perspective, or to their car dashboards for scenes of driver-passenger conversation.

Flips are also much less obtrusive than regular camcorders, so they’re ideal for making interview subjects, especially shy children, feel comfortable on camera. And as for spies and private investigators — well, ’nuff said. In short, the size/quality ratio of the Flip HD is just, as those crazy kids might say, ridiculous. Unfortunately, some aspects of the Mino HD are ridiculous in the traditional sense of the word. First, this model has the same 1.5-inch, square screen as the regular Flip cameras. A square screen? On a camera that takes widescreen video?

That arrangement means that you wind up with black letterbox bars above and below the image. (The designers have tried to justify those gaps by displaying the “Rec” indicator and battery gauge there, but still.) It also means that the image is very, very tiny. Second, there’s no image stabiliser.

Listen, we all get it — this thing is supposed to be very cheap and very basic — but the Mino HD wouldn’t be any more complicated to use if it steadied out your hand jiggles. The widescreen format of hi-def only magnifies camera unsteadiness, and it’s quite pronounced on the Mino. Good thing it has a tripod mount.