Helmet Cams

[Guest Rider on the Storm]

Hi. I am looking to buy a helmet camera. Can anyone steer me toward some good advice? From what I have seen I could be spending anywhere from $100 to $2000, which doesn't really help me that much

I usually ride with a Camelbak so I do have some room for a recording device.

[Rik Fromdahl]

check out oregon scientific.com. i got mine from shopko about a year ago on sale for $150. it comes with different mounting devices for a helmet or handlebars or whatever. it has limited memory that can be expanded with an sd card like for a digital camera. the drawback to their cam is there is no steadycam setting and you can't see the video without hooking it up to a tv, (so no on mountain playback) but for an inexpensive setup, it's not too bad.

[NoWeddings.com]

Helmet cams are still in their infancy in terms of capability. The lipstick sized units like Viosport provide the best resolution (520 lines?), but are just lenses, and so require an actual video camera in your back pack to feed the signal to. SD or Flash memory cameras (if they even shoot 30 fps) will be even worse resolution, but don't require an additional capture device.

I've had the best luck just using beater hand held mini-DV cameras. I had a Sony HC-46 for about 3 years that blew me away by the abuse it would take. Yeah, it's a bit more unwieldy than something the size of a lipstick, but you get better resolution, peripheral features like image stabilization, on hill review, better audio... I've commonly used the tripod hole on the bottom of the cam to mount it. Just go to Home Depot with your beater cam, find the metric section and grab a hex bolt that fits.

Since they tend to be top heavy, consider flipping the thing upside down and just rotating the picture in post production.

Good luck and post the footage here!