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gopro hero2 review
This one one of my Christmas presents and I have been playing with it now for a few days and have tried out most of the features. I know several others here have been considering this camera so I thought I would pass on my initial thoughts. There are probably a lot more technical reviews out there but this is from the boating/fishing standpoint.
This is not a family video camera. This is intended to attach to something and capture high quality video where normally you would never take your video camera because it would be trashed. I bought this mainly to attach as a cockpit cam for the boat.
1) The camera is really small, fits in the palm of you hand and is like a big ice cube. It actually looks a little cheap like a kids toy. But it is a solid little compact thing. No moving parts to speak of except a couple buttons.
2)The case is very rugged and waterproof to about 200'. It has a removable back door that allows one to put a "skeleton door on to get better sound in non waterproof operations. There are lots of ways to attach this to people /vehicles/stuff
3)It is a bare bones video box. No screen (one is available as an option but it is not waterproof then)
4) It has a 170 degree field of view. You get a little fish-eye effect at the edges but it is really wide. Personally I think it is not quite 170 but pretty close.
5)It has various modes, still, video, sequential shots, timed, etc. All very useful. The storage is an SD drive. In its highest HD mode this will dump a lot of data to the card so get the largest card you can ...32GB is what I would recommend. Mine came with a 8 GB and I filled that 1/2 up in about 20 mins of video. It has a HDMI video out as well as non-HD video out.
6) The quality of the video is outstanding. It is remarkable actually the kind of video you can get out of this little cube. It has no zoom no fancy lens but for what it is it does a great job. IMO that is the weakest element of the camera, the fixed lens..it is fine for most remote mounted applications but it would be nice to have some optical controls or settings.
7)I think it will work out well and stand up to the outside elements just fine. The biggest annoyances is the distortions due to the spherical window along the edges, straight on is fine. But that is compensated by the fact you can dunk this or bang it without getting trashed.
They are making a remote pack that would allow control of the camera remotely (wireless) as well as a wireless HD video feed to a ipad or cell phone. This will be a nice addition as you can turn it on/off and watch the feed remotely.
For the money ($200-300) it is a cool gadget for the outdoorsman.
Again I plan to have a couple fixed mounts on the top of the cabin looking out to the cockpit and out forward. Also I plan to attach it to a cement block and drop it down to the bottom of buzzards bay and watch video of tog stealing my bait in HD slow motion. (Maybe I can learn something)
This camera will be causing me to buy a several terabyte hard drive just to store videos, it will overwhelm my desktop pretty soon otherwise.
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