It’s always fun to get some recordings of a biking trail or a snowboarding trip, to be able to watch back and enjoy. But what you need for such an endeavour is a camera with good quality, that’s easy to use, versatile and lets you see what you’re doing at a pinch. What you need, in fact, is this RED5 Action Camera.
This is one of the more versatile camera of its type: it can be mounted in a variety of places – it has a sticky mount, straps, a cage for mounting on a tripod (with or without the waterproof case)… this is a camera that can be put on your helmet, on your handlebars, and it’s even compatible with GoPro mounts, perfect for strapping to your chest or your wrist and going nuts with (figuratively).
The camera has a wide angle lens (120 degrees, to be precise), meaning that it’ll capture more of whatever vistas you happen to be passing through. Better yet, the camera has a removable waterproof case that keeps it safe and dry – perfect for rainy mountain-biking experiences or surf adventures. The camera’s video quality can be maxed out to full HD 1080p for 15 frames per second, or 720 for 30 frames per second. And best of all it comes equipped with a screen on the back, so you can see exactly what you've recorded and make sure that it's mounted just so.
We here at the office decided that it was worth trying this baby out ourselves, just to see what the capabilities really were. We noted a few things that are worth keeping in mind. The first is that the battery lasted around 40 minutes of recording, but this might be dependent on usage and conditions. In addition, we found the smoothest video capture came from the 30fps 720P mode.
Regardless, this is a sturdy, solid little camera for taking on excursions, and will always get you awesome results.