Drift X170 Helmet Camera
Last updated: Fri, 19 Nov 2010 07:03:00 GMT
I am a notoriously tight bastard. Also self-absorbed. Imagine my glee when I saw an advert for the new Drift X170HD helmet camera, and realised that the superseded but still drool-worthy Drift X170 would soon be dropping in price.
It is said that a Yorkshireman is merely a Scotsman with his generosity removed. The temptation was too great to resist. Splurge:
I was attracted to the excellent Drift X170 by a number of features:
- simplicity
- robustness
- that groovy wide-angle rotating lens
and I wasn't disappointed. Use and configuration are trivially easy. It comes with a snappy RF remote control watch, so no fiddling with crap you can't see. It comes with a great array of fittings, including a goggle clip, and an excellent velcro helmet attachment with a simple and effective pitch adjustment to match that nifty roll-adjustment via lens rotation. The latter is rock-solid.
So, all good then? Well, no.
It has an automatic exposure feature that's pretty grainy, and in the places I ride, where there's a lot of sun and shadow, cover and sky, the stepping light levels are obvious. There's a bug in the firmware that means I can't use the auto-off functionality, because it switches itself off even when I'm recording. There's a lag between the audio and the video, but this may be down to the transcoding I have to do to get iMovie to read the movies. I have to transcode to get iMovie to read the movies. Wind noise is a problem, but I've got some foam I'm going to glue around the mic to make a baffle.
But on the plus side, all those cool things I said at the start, plus it was cheap, plus Drift Innovation's support is staffed by regular humans who are smart and responsive and helpful. Can't go wrong.
I'm glad I bought it, and it's a lot of fun. I've got a 4GB SD card in there, and it runs around 1GB an hour. I get about three hours out of a set of AA rechargable batteries. The remote works well, the beep tones for start and stop recording are loud enough, and distinct.
The helmet mount works surprisingly well. I'm experimenting with camera pitch to see if a lower pitch, meaning less sky, will show that exposure-stepping less. The weight of the camera is slightly noticeable, but I doubt it'll be straining my neck any time soon. Also, the image is mercifully free of those horrid ripples that plagued the Oregon Scientific helmet cameras that were so popular for a while.
After recording, I transcode the AVIs to MP4 using Prism and then import them into the best video editing software I can afford -- iMovies came free with my Mac Mini. From there, run through the copious raw footage marking up the raw footage with points of interest, copy generous chunks from the source footage into the movie, then start hacking it brutally 'til it fits under ten minutes. That's more than long enough to bore everyone who's not me.
Fun!