HD Hero2 Surf Camera

I bought this for my husband for Christmas 2011, mostly for use whilst he is mountain biking. It is the most popular present that I have ever bought for him. The quality of the picture is fantastic, even though he mostly cycles through forested areas and the light levels vary drastically between heavy wooded sections and clear mountain tops. The friends that he cycles with are impressed too and often ask himfor copies of rides that they’ve been on. He mainly uses the helmet mount,as when it is mounted on the handle bars it suffers from mud splashes. I offered to upgrade to the Hero 3 this year, but he was happy to stick with what he’s got, much to the children’s disgust. They thought this one would be coming their way.

This is the camera used to help make TV shows and so when planning a recent ski trip I decided that I would buy one of these to record our skiing adventures. I chose the Motorsport version and I also purchased the ‘Grab bag of mounts’ for around £16 which was more cost effective than buying the action version.

The mounts take a little getting used to but once you master them you can mount the camera anywhere and in any direction. The camera itself feels like a toy but once in the waterproof case it feels much more robust. I was amazed to note that the camera and mounts are good for 200mph plus!

You will need at least a 16gb SD card which will allow you to record around an hour and a half in 1080p, which is also about the capacity of the fully charged battery. Video quality is good in 1080p but the colours and clarity are better in 720p, which is also the setting where you get 2 wide angle options, super wide and just wide. There is also a 120fps mode for shooting super slow-mo which works very well.

A couple of negative points, you do not have a viewfinder so setting up is abit hit and miss although you can purchase an LCD backpak for around £80 which is great. Also when used as a headcam mounted to a helmet you cannot see if you have pushed the record button or not and you cannot, at present stream video from the cam, both these issues will be addressed with the forth coming wireless backpak and remote due summer 2012.

If you buy this camera I would suggest you buy the following accessories: spare battery, grab bag of mounts, 2 x 16gb SD cards or larger and a decent accessory case to keep it all in untill needed.

This little cam is definately the best action cam for under £300 and has all the spares and accessory options if you ever need them. I would highly recommend this item but beware, you may end up like me, buying 2 just to get another view and as a backup.

Just received this yesterday and haven’t taken it out on the bike yet but from some of my experiments this is what I’ve found

Short version:

I like it, it definitely works and with the exception of performing firmware upgrades on the camera and time lapse images, the abysmal Cineform software can be avoided simply by importing the .mp4 files into another video converter/editing package.

Long version:

Hardware is nice. Very good build quality.

Video quality is very good. There’s a bit more fisheye to it than I expected. Tweaking from the menus reduces it but it’s still more than I see in the sample videos online so I must have some tweaking to do yet.

LCD display is very tiny. If you’re past the half century mark as I am, you’re going to have a hard time selecting modes and configuring it. I got the LCD backpac with it and that makes it much easier to see the icons, though you’re still navigating through unfamiliar and low resolution icons using a two button interface.

I really like the hardware quality, and based on the videos from users I’ve seen, it’s got the image quality I want. It’s small, it’s light and it works.

The cons:

I always download the manuals for products before I buy them, just to see if there are any show-stoppers. One of the things I liked about the Hero2 is the manual says that you can use it while it’s plugged into the USB port. Unfortunately they forgot the asterisk after that feature. What should be there is “* as long as the camera is running at the time you plug it in to the USB port”. As far as I can tell you can’t turn it on and use it after it has been plugged in to the USB. You must be taking video at the time you plug it in and if you stop recording after you’ve plugged it in then it switches back to USB mode (i.e. charging only, no video) There may be some magic in the manual that I haven’t found yet so far that’s the way it is. The only thing it’s useful for (and I can see it being a critical feature) is if you are in the middle of taking video of something important and the battery gets low you can plug in the USB cable and keep on going.

GoPro Cineform software. Bleah. Really really bleah. It’s got an unintuitive user interface and in ~30 minutes of use I’ve had it crash with assertion failures 4 times and discovered several significant bugs, one that can potentially result in lost data. The potential data loss one involves changing the file format when converting video. I used Cineform to convert one of the .mp4 videos to an .avi. It created the .avi file in the output directory as expected. When that file turned out to be unplayable by VLC media player, I changed my settings to export as .mov and ran the conversion again. Two things happened: it ignored my settings and saved the video to the default video directory, not to the one in my settings, and when it finished I found that it had written the video to the same file name it used before – in other words it saved an .mov file with a .avi extension on it.

Codec issues: While the .mp4 files it saves on the SD card seem to play fine with everything I’ve tried, VLC can’t play back the converted videos Cineform produces. When I try to play back the .avi file using VLC I get an error: “No suitable decoder module: VLC does not support the audio or video format “CFHD”. Unfortunately there is no way for you to fix this.” Playback on Windows Media Player is fine.

Time lapse mode: I (stupidly) assumed that it would record to a video format since that would use very little space. It doesn’t, it records each frame to a separate .jpg file. This is the only video related feature I’ve found that seems to require you to use Cineform. Cineform present the sequence of .jpg files as one video clip. Anything else (like Picasa or Windows Explorer) just gives you a looong list of numbered .jpg files. The other annoyance is that individual .jpgs use a lot of storage if you’re doing time lapse at high resolution. Using a 2 second time interval between frames it filled a 32GB SD card in less than 15 minutes using 11 megapixel images.

The major annoyance:

They have no official support forums. You want to learn tricks, techniques and workarounds for the plentiful bugs in Cineform? Have fun with google because GoPro doesn’t maintain any sort of forum (or if they do, I haven’t found it yet) I’m guessing that’s due in part to the fact that people would spend a lot of time flaming on Cineform.

The minor annoyances:

Over-packaging taken to extremes, put on steroids, gone feral. I mean really excessive/irresponsible waste of natural resources. Gigantic clear plastic display case taped to even bigger cardboard box, and a big square of hard plastic with a mounting shoe glued to the top of the box. Then they add nice little touches like providing printed copies of the manuals – tiny little copies the size of the camera that are in fonts too small for anyone over 30 to read. To put the icing on the cake they print the LCD backpac manual in an inverse color scheme – black background (thanks for that waste of ink) with white letters that causes what would be a minimally usable manual to be completely unusable.

You’ll find unreadable manuals in the boxes but you won’t find a CD with the software or manuals on it – you have to go to the website to download those. You also won’t find a quick-start page/card/sheet in there. First thing you read when you open the manual is how to insert a battery – it doesn’t start with “here’s how the latch to release the camera from the case works so you can install a battery.” You have to skip way down in the manual to see how to do that. It really seems like they should have either gone one way or the other – either include readable printed manuals or else require everything be downloaded from their site and just put a quick start guide in the box. As it is it’s the worst of both worlds – I couldn’t read what they gave me and it didn’t save me from having to go to their website to download stuff either.

Things they missed:

It has a USB interface. Why do they (and other small device manufacturers) not provide an easy to use PC based interface to configure the device?

Why oh why oh why do I have to do the 800 button presses just to set the time and date? Again, it’s got a USB cable on it. My 10 year old Canon digital camera has the ability to set the camera’s time and date from the PC clock. How hard can it be?

If it had some sort of simple programming API – say REST or SOAP based, the open source crowd would sell more cameras for them than they could produce. They should scrap the Cineform effort and focus on making the camera features available via an API.

Now get off my lawn! D**n kids!

=== Update 2012-04-18 ===

Well, managed to record a head-on collision with another dirt bike. Search for “speed + target fixation” on youtube. The video quality is fantastic (and so is the ability of my fat ol’ bod to roll down a hillside) I took that one using the chest mount – which as far as I can tell is the best way to take video from an upright-style motorcycle. Obviously it wouldn’t work on a sport bike and given how fat and wide cruisers tend to be I’d guess it wouldn’t work that well on one of those (though I have far too much self respect to actually ride a cruiser so YMMV :p)

I’m currently running battery benchmarks on it in preparation for a long ride in June.

One problem I have is that it takes longer for the batteries to charge than it does to discharge. That means I’ve got to come up with a better solution because the very last thing I want to be doing on a 3,000 mile motorcycle ride is to set an alarm at night so I can get up every 4 hours and swap batteries on the charger :\ I’ve had this problem with every helmet camera I own.

What I’ve found so far:

I’m recording at 960 pixels 30 fps so that the 32GB SDHC cards don’t fill up before the battery dies.

Using either a GoPro or Wasabi (aftermarket) battery and turning the LCD backpac off I get between 1:50 and 2:15 recording time regardless of resolution, size, or brand of SD card used.

Using an internal battery plus an external 3400mAh battery pack and leaving the LCD backpac turned on (which eats a lot of power) I got 3:15 of recording. There was only a small amount of motion in it (just pointed it out my office window at the pasture out back) and it’s just a tad over 19GB.

The external battery pack looks like a potential solution – but I’d have to put a hole in the waterproof case if I wanted to simply plug it into the camera USB port as an auxiliary battery :\

I believe I’ll end up buying a couple of the higher capacity battery packs (they make them up to 10,000mAh) and use those to recharge the GoPro batteries while I’m riding. Then at night I’ll recharge the big batteries from the USB ports on my laptop and a small 110V wall-wart USB power supply.

Update 2012/05/06: I purchased one of the Anker 8400mAh batteries ([…]) and tried it out last night. I set resolution down to WVGA 60fps and I left the LCD backpac turned on (which eats a *lot* of power) and I got just over 8 hours of recording time. It was only 2GB shy of filling up a 32GB SD card. Unless you’re using it as a regular hand-held video camera the LCD backpac would normally be turned off. I believe I’ll get 10 to 12 hours of recording time with it off which is sufficient for a full day of riding for me.

The biggest thing I don’t like about the external battery solution is those external batteries have a very limited lifetime – typically around 100 charge/discharge cycles. Then it’s a throwaway/recycle Pretty wasteful but I don’t know of a better solution.

I really hate having to fumble around with SD cards and batteries when I’m on a long ride. The GoPro in particular is a pain, mostly because it’s very difficult to remove the battery from the camera, especially with tired/slightly numb fingers.

Overall it’s the best helmet camera I’ve used so far. Yeah it’s a bit fumbly fiddly to make it go but unlike all the other cameras I’ve used, this one really delivers on the video quality. It has now survived one motorcycle wreck and at least half a dozen tumbles to the floor, twice on concrete, twice on wood – and it keeps on ticking.