It’s hard to imagine a better Father’s Day gift for dad than preserving family memories with a cool new gadget. A new high definition video camera is the perfect complement to the HDTV and Blu-ray player that mysteriously showed up in the living room last year. This year’s digital camcorders offer ultimate portability, full high definition recording (1080p), face tracking, and automatic smile detection. Choosing the best camcorder can be difficult, and June 21st is just around the corner, so to simplify your decision here are 5 of the best camcorders for dads.

Like the Flip Ultra, the Flip Ultra HD is the easiest and simplest camcorder that you can lay your hands up on. Its makers have lived up to their promise of simplicity. But in the name of ease-of-use all of the Flips have been more or less replicas of each other, with just a feature or two added to every successor. According to me the biggest selling point of this “as simple as it can get” machine is its ease of use, ironically making it a miss fit for experts. It doesn’t have all the high end features like the optical image stabilization, the viewfinder, memory cards, video lights, or even a lens cap. Its Menu, consisting of just 4 buttons, can be described in a jiffy.