Originally Posted by
Ataylor
What's the "best" camera on the market today? I was interested in maybe capturing my Century ride, but after having run a quick search on here and Google, it seems as though many of the cameras either have a short battery life and/or don't support a micro SD greater than 64GB. If I'm riding for 6+ hours, will I have to rig something on my own? Meaning, would I have to go through the trouble of bringing either an extra battery for the camera, a charger for non-removable batteries, and extra memory cards (i.e. however many 64GB cards it would take to record the entire ride)? Or is there a high quality (video stabilization, waterproof, 4k video, etc) and compact camera out there with long battery life, that supports 128GB+ memory cards?
I use several cameras, depending on what I want to capture...
Samsung Gear360 360deg cam mounted on a 1ft selfie stick on a mount from Amazon. This shoots 360 video, fairly decent resolution. Fun to watch, more of a novelty vs. a serious video cam. It also will live-stream via. my phone, which is pretty cool...haven't done that on a ride, but might be pretty cool.
Olympus TG5 mounted on a mount from Amazon (the mount is solid aluminum and clamps down tight) - This is my goto action cam. It shoots unbelievable video or stills; great image stabilization. I use Garmin Virb video editor, its a bit of a process to convert the video from the Olympus to integrate with the telemetry from my bike computer, but its worth it.
GoPro Chinese knock-of, it shoots real 4K video. This thing is tough, takes very nice video (not as nice as the TG5), battery doesn't last more than 30mins (not a problem...read on). Has its own stabilization, but I usually tune it up with the GoPro software in post.
All these cams I power with a very large usb battery pack (3 usb ports and I use 6ft usb cables), I can shoot video for several hours with all but the 360 cam (it tends to overheat after about an hour).
The last set are my cheap Chinese dual action cams, just ordered it so I don't know how its going to work out...
https://www.ebay.com/itm/253820338228. I'm not concerned with quality, I want two things...high tech rear view mirror as an addition to the low-tech mirror and full time video in the case of an accident. This setup will stay on the trike, perminently mounted, powered from the power pack. I ride a trike, low to the ground, hard to be seen, even with several flashing lights...never know what might happen. This cam will get powered from a usb port on my 36v17.1Ahr battery for my motor.
Memory, just make sure the memory speed matches/exceeds the cam capability and desired frame rate. Bigger is better, strike-zone is probably 128, 256Gig in terms of pricing. Most of these cams will only record 4Gig per file, but depending on frame rate/resolution you can fill 4Gig in 10-30minutes. This isn't a problem with most of the video editing software, they will combine the files for a continuous video.
Time-lapse shooting is kinda fun to watch, I usually setup one cam for full video and then a time-lapse cam just to whip through when nobody wants to watch a full video.
Ron