I plan to use the Samsung sc-x105l for cycling (MTB, Road and Motorcycle) trips. I've had the unit a few days and familiarized myself with the controls. Fumbling for setup and features is always a battery burner so I try to be proficient before giving a real-life judgement on battery life.I did a road bicycle test yesterday in 56 degree weather, starting with a full charge (I had cycled the battery once prior to this), the image quality was set for 352 dpi at "normal". Two higher quality settings are available this is the lowest and most battery efficient. Electronic Image Stabilization was turned on which also uses more power. The LCD display door was closed and I used the external remote camera.
According to the manual, I should have gotten ~80 .minutes, the varible was the EIS, there is no mention of how much that lowers battery life. My actual battery life was 48 minutes. About half of what the manual stated.
Image quality at 352/normal was fair. When a car zipped past me, the image was not clear enough to read a license plate from 30 ft away during playback, even going frame by frame. Recording at higher resolution should help this but more testing required.
The good news was how much of the 512mb internal memory I had used in 48 minutes, which was only 95mb. I feel by increasing the resoltuion (which uses way more memory and some battery) an equal amount of memory and battery can be consumed yielding about 30 minutes of quality video.
30 minutes may not sound like much but frankly, 30 minutes of home moives is usually more than most people can take. I'll carry a spare battery and 1G memory stick top tranfer during longer trips.
BTW, the unit is amazingly small and light, build quality is sturdy. That is a big plus for the intended audience of this unit.
Downsides: only 2 I can come up with. Definitely need to buy extra memory cards. If you are going to take on vacation w/out your laptop to download the video to, then you'll probably want to buy another 2GB's. That would give you 2-3 hours of video over a week trip. Also, you'll need an extra battery. It's only good for about an hour (I run through it in a single 8yr old soccer game). Problem right now is that I can't find an extra battery to order anywhere. Accessories aren't really out yet (as of end of May). So, plan on another $300 to make it really livable. That all said, it's the coolest gadget I own. Haven't tried the helmet cam yet, but am already planning it.
Buy Samsung SCX105L MPEG4 Sports Camcorder w/10x Optical Zoom Now
I was very excited to receive this camera. My intent was to use it for skydiving video, after all I first saw the advert for it in Parachutist magazine. Anyway, I had it for about 1 week before I sent it back. It went through batteries very quickly and captured relatively grainy and dark video and stills. It takes several seconds to ready for video or stills and if I kept it in the ready mode for too long (20 min) the battery was about gone! The lense provided a pretty narrow field of view. It is good for standard back yard applications but as an "extreme sports cam" it is not ready for the quick and constant action of up close "extreme sports". Only the external optical cam eye is water resisitant. The rest of the cam will break if exposed to heavy moisture/rain/water. Another point of contention, I early purchased this unit from Amazon for $699. By the time it was delivered the price was already down to $569.00 from Amazon! Bottom line.....Wait till it is improved and the price settles down.Read Best Reviews of Samsung SCX105L MPEG4 Sports Camcorder w/10x Optical Zoom Here
I got this to record ATV riding adventures. It was this or the new super small Sony mini dv cam. I went with this because I think the mini dv cam would not hold on the trail with all the dust.I have had this for a few days to play with so far. I bought a 1gig scan disk card with it. It will record 63 minutes on the lowest 620x480 setting with the 1 gig card. The video quility is good on the lowest setting. I edited it with I-movie on my Mac and burnd a dvd and it looks great on the normal tv.
I could not get it to work with my windows vedio editing softwere ( Pinnacle and Screenblaster) but It does work with windows movie maker.
You may want to bump up to the super fine setting if you want HD quality. I only get 22 minutes with the 1gig card on the higest settings.
The external lens is cool. It come with a head and arm band. The extrem sports guys will love this for recording thier crazy stuff.
Overall I'm happy with it.
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I bought this in July immediatly before I left the country for an extended vacation. I have been using it for paragliding and snowboarding since then. Overall I think it's a great idea, but suffers in the execution. I would not recommend buying it. Unfortunately I was away too long to be able to return it.The good
size
simplicity of helmet cam
codec plugs into Apple framework no requirement to use imagemixer if you're a mac person
The bad
video quality
battery life (internal & external)
DivX codec conflict (I had to delete all other codec's before installing imagemixer to make it work)
can't copy files back to the camera
provided straps don't fit any of the helmets I use
weather proof case doesn't close properly if camera is oriented to mount on top of helmet
photo quality
Even at the "super fine" setting, the video quality is extremely poor. Colours are muddy, frame rate is jerky, white balance and exposure levels are terrible, and the lens distorts around the edges. My canon SD400 "still" camera does MUCH better video in it's VGA mode. I would rather that it didn't do stills, mp3, file browser, etc and just did good video. I don't think that's asking too much.
Hope this helps someone.
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