Have you ever sat and watched TV and seen the view from the perspective of someone right in the thick of the action? What springs to mind for me are the head-cameras that athlete Tanni Grey-Thompson has worn at various London Marathons in the past.

Well, you too can take advantage of this idea with Oregon Scientific's Action Cam. If it sounds like a weird concept to you, it does to me too. It's one thing seeing a marathon from a well-known athlete's perspective, complete with their spoken commentary, but quite another to think of creating this kind of footage yourself.

Still, I was prepared to suspend disbelief and give the thing a try. The Action Cam captures video with sound at three possible resolutions: 640 x 480, 320 x 240 and 160 x 120. You can choose 15 or 30 frames per second. It has 32MB of internal memory and an SD card slot for expansion.

The manual helpfully informs you of the storage capacity of the 32MB of internal memory and various sizes of SD card. Internally the maximum you can store is 11 minutes and 10 seconds of footage. That is at the lowest resolution and lower frame rate. Choose the highest resolution at 30 frames per second and you can manage 52 seconds. That's enough for a 400 metre run if you are a very good athlete. Switch up to a 2GB SD card and you can store between 60 minutes and 794 minutes of footage depending on your chosen quality setting.

The camera itself is a fairly large, cylindrical object, 400mm in diameter and 110mm long. It is powered by two AA batteries and with these in place I weighed it at 175g. It comes with a handlebar grip for your cycle, a couple of Velcro straps that might do for some cycle helmets and a rubber strap that is better for most cycle helmets.

Using the latter arrangement the camera feels reasonably solid. Don't even think about using it when running though, or in any other circumstance where you'll want to attach it directly to your head. The rubber grip doesn't feel too good straight onto hair, and the camera made me feel very lopsided. Also a little stupid, as it is a pretty large object to have clamped on the side of your head.

SD cards go in a slot on the back of the camera and, if you've inserted one, the camera automatically puts its footage there. The controls and a small display panel are on the camera's top. The controls let you choose shooting mode and, when you are ready, a large button starts filming. The same button stops it. There is a clock so your videos can be marked with the date and time.

You can send video direct from the camera to a TV using the provided AV-out cables. You can also use a mini-USB cable (not provided) to send footage to a PC. It is a plug-and-play device, so you don't need to install any drivers. Or you can just take the SD card and pop it into any device that will play AVI video files.

Image quality at the highest resolution and frame rate is good enough, and the camera auto adjusts for different lighting conditions fairly well. However, footage is obviously jerky rather than smooth.

Verdict
The Action Cam works, and there is a certain fun element to using it. But you can't capture much footage on an SD card if you want top quality stuff, footage is necessarily jerky, and you'll look like an absolute plank when wearing the camera.

Company: Oregon Scientific

Contact: 0845 601 3964

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