Samsung Instinct HD: Best Cell Phone Video Ever

When we first heard the Instinct HD was going to be $250 we thought Sprint had gone a little nuts. But now that we’ve seen the kind of video this non-smart phone can capture we’ll just come out and say it: The footage blows us away. Is its $250 good? You be the judge.

The Intinct HD’s The 5MP camera can record in QVGA, VGA and 720p HD, so we took the Instinct HD outside to check out the quality. The resulting video is below and is easily some of the best cell phone video we’ve ever seen.

We had to compress the video down to 480 x 360 for the embedded video. Check out the same video in HD on YouTube and note the difference. It’s worth noting that the video looked much better when we played it on an HD screen. Compressing it for the web takes away some of the quality, so unless you plan to make a DVD, the HD may not do you much good.

The zoom function degrades the image quite a bit, but for cell camera video this is very impressive. We were shocked at the Instinct HD’s $249 price tag just yesterday, but seeing this video is making us reconsider whether the device is worth it even though it’s not technically a smart phone.

Other than the video quality, our first impressions are fairly positive. The phone has a nice feel to it — solid but not bulky — with comfortably rounded edges. The touchscreen provides a nice bit of haptic feedback and is pretty responsive, though overall speed wasn’t blazing when we switched between menus and played some demo games. We still need to check out the Twitter and Facebook apps, but the Opera browser is decent (though not as good as the Palm Pre or HTC Hero ($541.60)).

We’ll have a full review up soon as well as some comparison video between the Instinct and other pocket HD camcorders. In the meantime, do you think the HD video makes the phone worth the price?