I might take the plunge. I like the as always subdued look of Sony's products, and Sony has night and day more experience in video than GoPro/Concourse. The image stabilization should be sweet. My only concern is the shape is similar to the Concourse, which I heard makes it difficult to chest mount. What are thoughts on chest mounting this?
If you mount your contour upside down or sideways; the rotating lens allows you to correct the position of the camera. Similar to gopros having a video flip feature for when the gopro is mounted upside down.
I am thinking that this is going to seriously take a bite out of Contour sales.
I would probably go for the Sony cam, but I already have a Contour HD. This low-profile shape is much better for helmet mounting, as well as head tube, top tube and down tube mounting. Actually, it is probably better for most on-bike mounting positions. But I am a big fan of the chest-mount perspective and I really miss that with the Contour. That is why I am getting a GoPro for my next camera.
They are going to have a hard time selling these if they don't come up with more mounts. Lack of vented helmet helmet strap and chest mount doesn't sound promising for a reasonable looking camera. They should either make more mounts or make an adapter to gopro mounts... If its legal.
Oh and the helmet stickies have no tilt options on them. Total mount fail Sony..I guess they missed the whole concept of mounts that gopro has going that makes them more successful than contour.
I use my countour HD with a chest mount. I just use a go-pro chesty with a tripod adapter and a tripod adapter on my countour. As long as the sony camera has some sort of tripod mount avaiable you can chest mount it.
There is something to be said about it's sleek design. (Same with Contour) I love my GoPro, but hate feeling like I have a Duplo Block stuck to the side of my head.
I might take the plunge. I like the as always subdued look of Sony's products, and Sony has night and day more experience in video than GoPro/Concourse. The image stabilization should be sweet. My only concern is the shape is similar to the Concourse, which I heard makes it difficult to chest mount. What are thoughts on chest mounting this?
I'm expecting Sony to have a better sensor and possibly better wi-fi but I'd be surprised if there was much else to see here. The price point is so low that I don't think there will be any earth shattering features. If GoPro release their ProTune upgrade then it'll be a whole new ball game in the low cost action cam world.
this guy has one already. In the vid you can see him put on the front cap. Looks to be the same.
Pretty decent but its you tube. How does that mess up the quality?
Image capture in the camera is typically compressed down to 15mbps or so, then re-encoded for YouTube. The original footage usually looks quite good on the home computer but goes downhill easily with further encoding. The main issue with these cams is the datarate of the original encode, if it were higher the image would hold up better. Crap in equals crap out so to speak.
I've made several DVDs from my riding footage, so it starts out at 15mbps and then goes down to around 5-7mbps for DVD. Not terrible but the difference is definitely noticeable.
With the ProTune version on GoPro2 the data rate will be 35mbps, the default Blu Ray encode from Encore sits at 30mbps so the quality should be very good HD on an HD TV set. This is of course if GoPro actually release the upgrade ....
The SteadyShot alone makes this Sony worth it over pretty much anything out there.
One more reason for me to sell my Contour ROAM which is basically useless with any kind of movement. Helmet mount or Chest mount I simply can't get footage that doesn't have tons of shakiness and vibration.
looks sweet, not worried about the mount options as it comes with a standard 1/4-20 threaded mount soo pretty much anything will work or can be customed to work. I've found most of Contour's and GoPro's mounts suck anyway... cept the cheat mount, I think that is the best angle/location I've seen for biking.. Helmet mounting sucks 90% of the time unless it's a full face.
there are 2 models out right now you can get (think J&R's has both in stock) 199 and $269 pricing it seems the extra 70 bucks gets you the wi-fi.
might just dump my contour and get one of these... (though I like the lens rotation on the contour very much... when I remember to turn it that is )
I've put together a review of some of the issues with the Sony action cam. To me it really felt like there was some fundamental issues with the camera that the likes of GoPro, Contour and Drift have recognized and solved in the past couple of years.
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Thanks for the feedback--I was thinking of getting this, but I think I will wait for there next generation.
Here is the video comparison we did with the GoPro Hero2 Silver vs Sony Action Cam vs Contour+2 vs Drift HD. You can skip the talking by going straight to the 4:20 mark:
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Thanks for the comparison vid! As far as general image quality my eye likes the GoPro best out of this group. Others are good though, including the Contour except holy color cast, Batman! The steadyshot does seem to help a little on the Sony, but it's certainly not going to work miracles. Mountain biking is a bumpy sport.
Now regarding Protune mode on GoPros, that mode isn't really meant to be compared to other cameras' standard modes. Besides overall better quality (less compressed) output, it gives you much flatter and less saturated footage which gives you a much better starting point to color grade in your editing software. I'm already seeing GoPro videos where people use Protune mode and haven't done any color/tonal editing to their footage...I guess they assume it's going to give them a more "pro" looking video straight out of the camera. Nope! You have to think of it like shooting in RAW mode with your still camera. An unprocessed RAW image looks flat until you process it and bring out its potential.
I used a contour + from where I work for a while, and purchased and immediately returned a Sony action cam in order to purchase the gopro hero 3 black edition. Here are some of my reasonings:
My background is in film and video, and I am a totally quality nut. Before the hero3 was announced, I felt the Sony cam had the sharpest, most natural age image of the three (contour, hero2, Sony action cam).
HOWEVER I soon realized that regardless of the quality of the image, if you can't point the camera where you want it to look, have it stay there, and not jiggle everywhere, then all that quality means nothing!
The ability to rotate the contour's lens is a HUGE advantage for me...they have a mount that is basically a rubber strap that I've mounted to my wrist, my motorcycle swing arm, my leg, my bicep--and thanks to the rotating lens I can get the tilt just right. However I will not buy a contour because the one I borrowed from work shoots half it's video completely out of focus, and also it decides to corrupt video files it records at random. I simply lost faith in the brand.
My Sony, for the week I had it, shot pretty decent video. However, mounting it was a whole other story. It only has the standard tripod mount on the bottom which is only there if you have the waterproof housing on it. I purchased a 3rd party vented helmet mount and the camera was so heavy with the waterproof housing that it wobbled everywhere. Plus you could Not aim it in any way shape or form...at least with the gopro you can tilt the cam up and down.
I thought about side mounting it on my moto helmet, but even if I purchased the Sony headband mount, it doesn't seem that you can aim the camera at all...the best I could do was to buy a handlebar RAM mount (check out RAM mounts, it's a brand and they are pretty neat) and ratchet on my bars. That worked, but having limited angles for mounting left a lot to be desired from me.
The hero3 black edition seems to have it all: superior image quality, a plethora of well tested mounts (e.g. The CHEST MOUNT ), and smallest form factor. It should ship on the 14th of November, so once it comes in I will try and let everyone know if it lives up to my expectations.
I might take the plunge. I like the as always subdued look of Sony's products, and Sony has night and day more experience in video than GoPro/Concourse. The image stabilization should be sweet. My only concern is the shape is similar to the Concourse, which I heard makes it difficult to chest mount. What are thoughts on chest mounting this?
I can off the bat say the image quality from that cam will suck ass judging from the size of the objective alone. the sony that is.
The objective is the first element of the camera and its whats pointed towards the object you are photographing, the smaller it gets the worse the light gathering ability, and the smallewr it gets the worse the maximum optical resolution will be. Don't really matter what sensor you put behind it because its **** from the start. And you just cannot untoast toast! The objective is the most important part of the whole camera, if that degrades im age quality then it cannot be restored after the objective. ever.
In this particular case when you work with fixed parameters and have no way of going outside of those it doesn't really matter who makes the camera, its **** anyway, seriously working wioth a 25mm dia lens or so is a big hurdle, and it can never ever get better than what you get from a 25mm lens which is of course ****, so we are really comparing one bucket of **** to the other. You can put lipsitck on a pig! won't change the fact that its still a pig though.
I guess you are reading to much into this, its not going to be significantly better than anything else in the same format. the smaller the diameter of the objective the worsxe image quality (light gathering ability), the shorter the package (smaller f-number) the worse the quality (abberations, such as chromatic abberation) And there is no way around it with the knowledge we have today, this is how it works.
I definitely agree that there are serious limitations due to the tiny nature of the lenses and image sensors on these type of cameras...but when I watch the video shot 100% with the GoPro hero3 on their website it blows my mind....which is hard to do when I work with $50000 broadcast cameras on a daily basis....
I can't post a link yet but just to to GoPro dot com and the video is the first thing that plays. Watch in 1080p!
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Originally Posted by motard5
(though I like the lens rotation on the contour very much... when I remember to turn it that is 
)
), and smallest form factor. It should ship on the 14th of November, so once it comes in I will try and let everyone know if it lives up to my expectations.
Originally Posted by iheartbicycles
