Talk to me about action cameras

Diddums · Wednesday at 08:43

Thinking of doing the odd motorcycle vlog. Nothing major, if it takes off I'll invest some more coin in to decent kit, but in the mean time I just need something decent at an affordable price.

I might even buy a few if they're cheap enough. One for my helmet, one looking at me, one facing backwards. Alternatively I can buy a 360 which will help with this too.

I see that the mounts and stuff are fairly costly, but there are tons of used ones so I can grab a load of those.

Nothing even sure where to start. GoPro was the main brand back in the day, and every second vlogger is peddling Insta360 now. These are fairly costly though, and if this takes off I'll blag a free camera from Insta anyway, so just need cheap & cheerful for now.

Is a used Insta a better buy than a new cheaper model?

Any advice appreciated.

Cheers.

Rroff · Wednesday at 08:48

Not something I know a huge amount about but a lot of the content creators I watch seem to be using DJI products now, problem is finding something which has a good balance between price and performance - the cheaper stuff will have noise in dark areas, lots of software processing artefacts especially if using lower resolution sensor(s) and frame rate tricks to fake a higher resolution and/or annoying pulsing from poor quality implementation of auto light correction, etc.

[FnG]magnolia · Wednesday at 09:01

Diddums said:
One for my helmet, one looking at me, one facing backwards. Alternatively I can buy a 360 which will help with this too.

Phrasing!

Diddums · Wednesday at 09:16

This chap seems to do a fairly balanced review and rates the Gopro Hero 13.

A bundle is over £500.

Don't wanna spend that much, I guess I need to look at some older / cheaper models.

darael · Wednesday at 09:26

If you want a simple, cube, 4K, no frills action camera I recommend the RunCam 5. I can't comment on the microphone, but the image quality is more than good enough for me.

Rroff · Wednesday at 09:31

Diddums said:
This chap seems to do a fairly balanced review and rates the Gopro Hero 13.

GoPro has better quality, dynamic range and better potential for post-processing, but I feel like the DJI has better quality, colour and lighting on the main focus content of the footage which is more pleasing on the eye to watch despite the fake HDR injection which seems to be going on. GoPro stabilisation was way out ahead of the others, interestingly the Insta360 did really well at the night time lapse despite sucking for low light footage in general (despite looking a bit better in some low light shots there was a lot of problems in the image quality whereas the others could be tuned in post-processing to get something acceptable).