After asking my fellow dopers for advice, and considering my own needs, I recently bought this camera.
I press the power button for 10 seconds (I read somewhere you’re supposed to do that), plug it in, and this orange light comes on in the front, but nothing on the screen, still black. It’s charging, but – excuse my technological illiteracy – is this normal? Or am I doing something wrong?
I have one of these. You are not doing anything wrong. I am sorry to inform you that you purchased a POS. The video camera is fine, but it has been very tempermental during charging. The orange light is on and one would think it was charging. Not necessarily. Evidently it needs a specific voltage and your own computer may not charge it, and a wall charger may not, either. You have no way of knowing until you go to turn it on.
I spent a number of weeks on and off trying to figure this out. Flip has a website and you can read how some people overcame the issue. I had to reset the thing using the pin-hole in the tripod mount (hold for 20 seconds, then release, hold again for 20 seconds, then plug in, but don’t let your computer go into sleep mode, etc…). None of my home computers or wall chargers would charge it, so on a whim and just about to give up I took it to work and did the aforementioned resetting exercise, plugged it into my work docking station, and a few hours later, lo and behold, the darn thing came to life.
The thing is flakey so be sure to download any videos to your computer right away in case it decides not to take a charge. When it has no power, it is not at all recognized by your computer, so any video is stuck on the device. No wonder Cisco stopped selling these things.
Sorry for the negativity, but it was frustrating not being able to access some great videos because of the charging issue, which is apparently widespread.