Search For Contour 1500 Contour Plus Camera at Amazon
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You are probably pretty good at your chosen action or physical endeavor and imagination increasing your enjoyment even further. If you haven’t realized already, the straightforward answer is to invest in a Contour HD Helmet Camera. There are some other brands and choices available to you, with prices commencing at $90 through $350, but there are a number of constituents to consider such as Design, Reliability, Lightness, After-Sales Service etc.. If you are like me you value all of the above, so let me suggest that you ought to unquestionably consider the Contour HD Helmet Cam. Below are galore points that you may wish to think about:
With the above facts in mind, I hope that you want to investigate further the possibleness of laying out capital in the Contour HD Helmet Cam. Or… are you looking for the uttermost in High Definition Helmet Cameras? Then you must look at the Contour HD 1080P, the professional user’s choice. It is the very initial 1080p HD Helmet Camera. The Contour HD 1080P Helmet Cam shares it’s cutting edge engineering science with the Contour HD but has numerous further and added features requested by the experienced or professional user. These are as follows:
So, if you are a perfectionist looking for those further and added refinements, the 1080P may just be for you, at only $50 more. If you are reading this then you might have a Helmet Cam already and recognise first-hand the pleasure to be gained in being competent to re-live your exploits, whether in the sky, on the waves or on the ground. You will, almost certainly, already have a Full HD TV or one that has the suitable receiver attached. Imagine being capable to watch your skill and daring when paragliding or skydiving. View once more your mastery of a outstanding wave when surfing. Likewise with snowboarding or skiing where you may re-live those daring descents. No matter which helmet cam you have applied before, you are in for a pleasant surprise with this Contour, the very firstborn Full HD 1080P model. Just like it’s brother, you may fix the Contour HD 1080P nearly anyplace with it is selection of mounting aids. You may even fit the HD 1080P to your goggles and not move them. The reason is, of course, because it weighs just 4.3 ounces! You may also fit the Contour HD1080P to almost any percentage of any motorized vehicle, whether 2 or 4 wheels. See both cameras at HiDefHelmetCams. Most helpful customer reviews 56 of 59 people found the following review helpful. 6 of 6 people found the following review helpful. Before I cover the new features, I should mention the things that haven’t changed: Form Factor – The size, weight and shape of the Contour+ is pretty much the same as previous models. I prefer it to some of the other offerings for both practical and aesthetic reasons. When mounted on a helmet, wrist or leg it doesn’t look like I’ve got some monstrous appendage growing out of me. This may seem like a styling issue but it has very practical implications when getting on, riding and getting off lifts. It doesn’t contact safety bars and I’m able to turn my head without it hitting surrounding objects, or people. There are some mounts for other cameras, like chest mounts, that avoid these issues, but chest mounts for snowboarding don’t work very well as the direction of travel is generally not where your chest is facing. On/Off Switch – The placement and function of the on/off switch is such that it is reasonably easy to operate, yet it can’t be accidentally operated. Record switch – Although the Contour+ record switch is now chunkier due to the GPS antenna, the actual operation remains similar to the ContourHD version. It’s well placed and positive in operation and, if anything, it’s easier to operate with gloves than the ContourHD, although I never had a problem with the older ContourHD. The familiar beeps used to indicate various states are loud enough to hear without being intrusive. OK, now to the new (for me) stuff: Video – This is the thing that pleased me the most. There is a significant and noticeable increase in quality over the ContourHD. I assume this is due to the new lens design and materials. The video seems “crisper” and there seems to be much less of an issue with contrast. I ended up adding a polarising lens to the ContourHD to get over a contrast issue with snow, whereas I used the Contour+ without a polarising lens, on default settings, and achieved better quality video than I was able to get from the ContourHD. Note: Just about all my video was recorded in the “action” mode 720p 60fps. Field of View – I liked the greater Field of View, but there is a down-side. The issue is that it is more difficult to mount the Contour+ in such a way that you don’t get surround objects (helmet, goggles, etc.) in the frame. I ended up modifying the rails on the camera so that it would sit further forward (about and inch) in the rotating surface mount. Personally, I’d like a additional video setting that mimicked the older 135° Field of View. GPS – The GPS worked well and, in my opinion, was a great feature to add to the camera. I had no locking issues and it was accurate. When snowboarding you generally have a good view of the sky, so I can’t report on it’s effectiveness in more challenging terrain, such as built up areas. Bluetooth – The Bluetooth connectivity worked well, 90% of the time. There were occasions where I was unable to establish a connection, but I was able to eventually connect by either re-pairing or turning my iPhone off and then on again. This feature could use some work to make it bullet-proof. In terms of the Bluetooth functions, the ability to change the settings on the fly is invaluable, as is the ability to line the camera up out in the field. Audio – In comparison to the ContourHD the audio is a big improvement. I’m not sure if it’s the new location of the inbuilt mic, or the design of the mic enclosure, but it is less affected by wind noise than the ContourHD 1080p. You still get wind noise, but you have to be either travelling faster or be hit by a good gust of wind at a particular angle. That pretty much wraps up the pros, now for the cons, which pretty much comes down to the video importing and editing software – Storyteller. Storyteller is Contour’s video importing, editing and uploading software. It’s editing features are limited to basically trimming the video, so if you want to do anything more adventurous you will have to use some other video editing tool, like iMovie. It also allows you to change the settings on the camera. While the editing, uploading and camera settings functionality works, if in a fairly simple way, the file handling leaves a lot to be desired, particularly if you have more than one camera. When videos are recorded they are given sequentially numbered filenames on the camera, i.e. FILE0001.MOV, FILE0002.MOV, etc. OK, that seems like a good approach, until you import and delete the videos from the camera, at which point the file numbering is reset and new videos are saved with numbers starting at “0001″ again. See the problem? You end up with duplicate filenames. Well Storyteller gets over this by appending a “-1″, “-2″, etc. suffix to avoid duplicates. However this approach ends up being confusing. It’s bad enough with one camera, but imagine having two cameras and trying to work out which video was recorded by which camera when. Storyteller dumps all the videos in the one folder so you end up with a confusing list of files like “FILE0001-1.MOV”, “FILE0001-2.MOV”, “FILE0002-1.MOV”, etc. A similar issue arises if you don’t use Storyteller to import the videos. You need to separate them into different folders or rename the files as you copy them. Not such a big issue? Maybe, but it leads on to the the second issue I have with file handling – timestamps. The Contour+ uses the time received from the GPS to timestamp the files (great idea), but there is no ability to add a time offset for local time. This may be manageable if you live closer to the Prime Meridian, but for those of us 1/2 way around the world it’s a nightmare because videos from one day can be timestamped with two different dates and confusing times. Manually applying a time offset to calculate the local time and date is not an easy process as a result. Not impossible, but so easily avoided with a relatively simple change to the software/firmware. Because of the timestamping even using something like Lightroom to import the videos ends up with videos in incorrect folders. Various suggestions have been made on the Contour support forums to improve the file handling, so I live in hope that at least some of them will be incorporated in future releases of Storyteller and the camera firmware soon. Conclusion: Rating the Contour+ was difficult for me. Looking purely at the camera and it’s features I would give it 5 stars; however, because the supplied software is integral to the overall package I could only give it 4 stars. Storyteller itself barely rates 3 stars. It does what it needs to do, but it could be so much better. Unfortunately, because of the file numbering and timestamping issues it’s not even an easy process to ditch Storyteller and use another tool, and then you would also have to forego the moving map display available on the videos uploaded to the Contour community site. The Contour+ is a significant and easily worthwhile step up from the ContourHD 1080p. More good features, better video and better audio all make it a great upgrade. In my opinion the Contour+ is so good that I would recommend it to anyone, unfortunately that recommendation has to be in spite of the current state of the supplied software rather than including it. Roll on software and firmware updates … |
Slightly sharper than the GoPro HD, but a little Green…
