Action camera clones are propping up everywhere and that is one of the reasons GoPro as a stock investment has under performing. The plethora of options keeps getting more diverse and at even lower entry prices.
The Firefly 6S and Veho K-Series K-2 Pro and K-1 are such products that aim to do it all for the action camera enthusiast while competing at a lower entry price. This doesn’t necessarily mean cutting corners do to lower prices and these two brands seem to fit the bill in one way or another to fill the shoes of a GoPro Action camera competitor.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
In our last post we looked at the HSC768 high speed camera project that had great performance and ergonomics including a jog wheel design and machined case. We asked the creator of the camera David Kronstein, who runs the Youtube channel Tesla500 from Vancouver Canada, a few questions regarding the future of the project and he kindly responded with some great insight. We may have a third competitor in the HD high speed camera market to go head to head with the edgertronic camera and the yet to be released fps1000 project.
While the camera is still in the lab stages, it shows a usable design with professional looking performance and a pretty lengthy buffer. There is a touch screen interface based on a stripped down Linux OS installation and DDR3 high speed DRAM 16GB worth that can do quite a good set of frames.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
tesla500 is a Youtube and Patreon video channel by Electronics Engineer David Kronstein that has a lot of videos of engineering projects and troubleshooting / fixing stuff. Some videos are based on a homebrew camera project that gained our attention. The camera is a high speed monochrome at the moment with HSC768 name which is based on the data rate of the image sensor, in this case 768Mpix/s, or about 960MB/s . The camera project started in 2014 as a way to get a high speed camera for the lab without paying the hefty premium.
The Kickstarter project Z E1 has been funded over 4x their initial goal and now proceeds to build the cameras based on a Micro 4/3 sensor and an extremely small GoPro-like camera body that does 4k video and up to 120fps HD video in an upcoming software update; the camera form factor is ideal for drone aerial photo and video. It promises professional video and photo quality with no compromises in an incredibly small body which would be close to what Olympus attempts with the Air A01 or DxO with the One. The camera does have a 2.5″ inch Screen on teh back but also relies on a 200-300ms response time over wifi which is short for little lag. The Interface is iOS and or Android and are already available for download on these platform stores for remote shooting.
It seems that GoPro is not quite done with camera updates this year. They just released a very small variant of the Hero 4 hardware called the GoPro Hero 4 Session. Some jokes have already come out about the name like the next Re-Session Camera to own. However this is more of an evolutionary and reductionist product than any release GoPro has ever made before.
The Hero 4 Black is a powerhouse little camera with great frame rates for slow motion and 4k video at 30p. Some have criticized the codec in 4k mode as being too lossy and we agree to a point. What interest us however is not the 4k mode for now which is absent from the GoPro Hero 4 Session altogether but the lower res Full HD and HD slow motion high frame rate modes.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
