Cheap Action Camera - Any Recommendations

[John P]

Hi,

My wife has asked me what I'd like for Xmas and I was thinking about a cheap action camera which would really only be used on the car.

I did buy a very cheap one a few years ago but although it looked quite well made the results were extremely poor and eventually I got a refund from the supplier.

I really would like to pay under £75 and have seen reviews of the Qinux PixGo 4K, the AKASO EK7000 and Wolfgang GA100 which are around this price but seem to get a mixture of both "very good" and also "disappointing" reviews.

Has anyone and experience of an action camera in this price range and would you recommend one?

John.

[RupertW]

I suppose it slightly depends what you want to do with the footage, but generally speaking if it's something you want to use on the car the most critical aspect will be vibration dampening, which I think is largely down to software nowadays than hardware. I believe that's largely why GoPros became so popular in the first place, but there's a lot of knockoff cameras out there nowadays that'll be 95% as good at a fraction of the price. You might also want to think about connectivity in terms of whether it's a wired/SD card/Bluetooth data transfer. I suspect that any action camera made within your price range is likely made in the same factory with different branding, so there might be little in it for specifying an exact manufacturer

[Andy Bennett]

I have some experience of CCD and CMOS imaging devices for satellites and in not suggesting they are comparable, in my opinion the 2 most important aspects are the material of the lens (cheap cameras use plastic lenses that will always be inferior to glass (milky, washed out, poor focus, glare and will scratch etc) and the quality of the sensor. In quality this doesn't mean the claimed horizontal resolution (eg 4K) or total number of pixels (eg 5MP, which is lower resolution than 4K). You can get an awful lot of pixels in a $2 CMOS but every one of them will be rubbish and the frame rate is likely to be low.

One of the most significant aspects to the quality of a sensor is the physical size of each pixel. The smaller the pixels then the smaller a '4K' sensor will be and so the more you can fit on a wafer so the cheaper each one will be. Each pixel on a space quality sensor will be perhaps an order of magnitude larger and so able to capture more photons. Again that's at the extreme but the smaller the pixel the less good its relative performance will be. This pixel size is hidden beyond any spec for a regular camera so here you are back to seeing what people say about it's ability to work in lower light, glare, colour saturation etc.

They package a plastic lens with a rubbish '4K UHD sensor' in a nice looking plastic outer which is perfect for an Amazon listing.
The only way to avoid ultimate disappointment is to buy a known brand from a reputable supplier, ie not a clone, with reviews across reputable platforms.

Thinking about it, this is all sounding somewhat similar to the question I asked a few weeks ago about Chinese lathes...

[Tony Griffiths]

I have had two GoPro cameras. Both were sent back to the supplier, Amazon for a refund. One needed a firmware upgrade out of the box and refused to work, while the other overheated, and the battery lasted 5 minutes. If you are considering one of those, be sure to read the one-star reviews.