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By 

Ali Julia (boston, mass) –

  

  

Customer Video Review Length:: 5:03 Mins

This is a nice little camera. I have been using it every day for about 2 weeks and in this review include what I liked and did not like about this camera. Overall in my experience the positives out weigh the negatives. Attached video shows me operating the camera, as well as the images produced by the video camera at full resolution and using digital zoom.

I was impressed by how much was included in this package: besides the camera, the package included a waterproof case (hard plastic with built-in buttons), wi-fi remote control, and 4 different mounting clips.

My favorite feature is of this sports camera is that it has an LCD screen on the back so you can see what the camera is seeing, which makes this camera more than just a wide angle action camera. You can use it for other things as well.

The camera is very small and light. It is 2.75″ wide, 2″ tall, and 1″ thick. Its weight is 3 oz without the waterproof case. The empty waterproof case weighs 3.1 oz. So the camera in the waterproof case is 6.1 oz. The LCD screen is 2.4″ in size.

The camera is capable of 12 mega pixels photo images and 1080p video. It supports 4X digital zoom. The digital zoom really degrades the quality of the image significantly. A digital zoom is the same as doing cropping of the image in the computer after you took the photo. However the result of the digital zoom in the camera work much worse than doing cropping to the same size in Photoshop. My video includes several examples of taking a photo of the same area with and without digital zoom so you can see and compare the results. I find the results of the digital zoom in the camera unacceptable. So I use digital zoom only to help me compose the photo in the sun. When the details of the image are hard to see I use digital zoom to make sure that I got the image I am interested in and then zoom out to take the picture. If I need to do cropping, I do so in the image editing software on my computer.

The camera is easy to operate. The top has two buttons: on/off and take photo/start video recording. The other operations are performed using the touch screen of the camera. The icon are clear and operate well, the only problem I ran into is that in the bright sun I could not see the icons displayed on LCD screen. But eventually I memorized where they were located and was able to operate them in the sun even when I did not see them. In general the LCD screen does not have a lot of contrast and is a bit hard to see in the sun.

The camera has 4 modes: video, photo, car, and playback. Both video and photo modes have optical zoom. In the photo mode there is a timer function. You can use normal, 10 seconds timer delay, and triple photo sequence.

The remote has 3 buttons. On/off key, and ‘snap’ key to take a photo, and ‘rec’ key operate video camera. If the camera is in video mode and you hit ‘snap’ button nothing happens. Note that you cannot change the mode once you have the waterproof case on. The case has only two buttons – turn the camera on/off and action button, which either takes a picture or starts/ends the recording. So if you want to use the camera under water you have to decide on video or photo before you close it up. Remote works with the waterproof case on and off, but remote itself is not waterproof.

The camera has a tripod mount on the bottom. It works with any regular tripod. HDMI and USB ports on the right. Micro SD and factory reset button on the left. The camera can be charged by any source using mini USB to USB cable.

The camera produces AVI format for video and JPEG for photos. When I plug in a USB cable into the camera, I see the camera as external drive. I did not need to install any drivers or software.

★ The camera accepts micro SD up to 32G. Micro SD is not included. Micro SD cards with the speed higher than class 4 are recommended. I am using class 6 and it works well.
★ The camera supports USB 2.0 interface.
★ Video mode supports VGA (120 FPS), HD (60 FPS), HD (30 FPS), FHD 1920×1080 30 FPS).
★ Photo mode supports 12M, 10M, 8M, 5M. The camera comes with default set to 5M. To change it, you need to touch an icon which displays 5M at the top of the screen and you will get a display of other options to select from. However, none of the changes are remembered if power off the camera. It always turned on with the default of 5M and you need to remember to change the resolution back to what you want the next time you turn on the camera.
★ Lithium Ion battery can last up to 2 hours of recording.

To summarize here the pros and cons of my experience after several weeks of use

Pros:
~~~~~~~
✔ Size and weight
✔ LCD screen to compose
✔ Remote control
✔ Water proof case
✔ Image quality at full resolution…

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