View to a Thrill: 3 POV Cameras Tested and Rated

 
          

Whether you’re a sports fanatic or an indie filmmaker on a budget, POV cameras are great for adding a humanizing bit of perspective to your video. Strap one of these to your head, body, board or bike, hit “record,” and put your audience directly into the middle of the action. Drop in on a wave or jump out of a plane, and your viewers get taken along for the ride.

One player has dominated the market recently: GoPro. Since its foundation in 2002, the company has been challenging the idea of what should be expected from an affordable POV camera. Recently, however, several other companies have introduced cameras that compete with the same core strengths — picture quality, ruggedness, usability and price. We decided to test the GoPro HD HERO2 against two of the strongest contenders, one camera from Contour and the ION Air Pro. The video above shows results from all three, and the full reviews are below.

ION Air Pro Wi-Fi

The sturdy and sleek ION Air Pro Wi-Fi ($350) is made to take a dunking — it’s completely enclosed in a waterproof housing that allows it to safely film at depths of 30 feet. With a 170-degree field of vision, it would be pretty hard to miss any of the action you see through your snorkeling mask.

One of the best features about the ION Air Pro is that the camera itself vibrates when it begins recording — really helpful feedback when the camera is mounted somewhere you can’t see it. Speaking of mounting, the ION Air Pro comes with a huge selection of accessories for attaching it to helmets, bikes and other sports gear. It can shoot up to 60 fps, and with the Wi-Fi back, you can use a tablet or phone as an external monitor (not recommended under water).

And now, the negatives. The camera’s settings can only be programmed through a computer, so if you forgot to switch to the mode you need before a shoot and you don’t have access to a computer, you’re stuck. Also, the ION Air Pro automatically flips its frame between portrait and landscape, and more than twice during testing, I ended up with vertical video when I didn’t want it. Lastly, and most importantly, the image just doesn’t hold up that well. The color temperature seems off, as if the daylight temp is set to at least 7,000k. This gives the image a warm, saturated feel. Also, it suffers badly from the rolling shutter effect (when the sensor quickly scans across the frame rather than capturing the entire frame at once, causing wobbles, jiggles and other artifacts). As a result, much of our captured footage was borderline unusable.

UPDATE: I should note that just last week, ION released an update to its iOS app that lets you adjust more of the camera’s settings, and a firmware update that fixes the image-flipping issue. Neither of these updates were available during our testing period.

WIRED Vibration feature is super-helpful. Wi-Fi pairing lets you use a touchscreen device as an external monitor. Reliable, user-friendly and diverse mounting system.

TIRED Super-saturated colors and rolling shutter effect really hurt image quality. Lacking an external battery.

Contour+

The Contour+ ($500), which we reviewed independently earlier this year, has a cylindrical aerodynamic build, as well as a one-touch slider bar for recording. It can connect to a smartphone to do the remote-viewfinder trick. The camera also has a 170-degree field of vision — all attributes that bring it pretty close to the ION Air Pro.

However, compared to the ION Air Pro, the image produced by this camera is simply amazing, especially when used in reasonably stable settings. As a bonus, you can manually twist the lens to pick the appropriate horizon for a specific angle. The color temperature has also been dialed in perfectly, and with an f/2.8 aperture available, the camera is able to cut down significantly on image noise. As far as setup and adjustment, it was the most user-friendly POV camera in the line-up.

My biggest quibble: the dreaded rolling shutter effect. While the Contour+ is more stable than the ION Air Pro, the picture still suffers from its lack of image stabilization. Also, the Contour+ can switch between two user-determined settings, but only two. If you want to program more modes, you have to plug it into a computer. Finally, it doesn’t come with many mounting options — you get a profile mount and a pair of flat-surface mounts. If you want more options (like waterproofing or sport-specific mounts) you’ll have to pay extra.

WIRED Wide-open aperture and excellent picture quality when stable. Manual horizon control. Built-in GPS puts your radness on the map. Tremendous ease of use when mounting and recording.

TIRED Image suffers from persistent rolling shutter effect. Lack of useful mounting systems included with the camera is cause for frustration. Expensive.

GoPro HD HERO2

What the GoPro HD HERO2 ($300) offers that its competitors don’t is access to all of its settings and features using only the on-camera controls. With this model, you can pick between frame rates ranging from 30 fps to 120 fps, choose NTSC or PAL, and set the quality between 720p to 1080p — all without the need to carry your laptop into the field.

Aside from being able to shoot at a best-in-test 120 fps, the folks at GoPro have somehow found a way to greatly reduce the rolling shutter effect on the camera’s CMOS sensor. All this and it’s still very affordable: it’s $300, and depending on the bundle you choose, the camera comes with a variety of sport-specific accessories and mounts for motorsports or surfing.

The GoPro’s versatility comes with a trade off: Choosing settings is time-consuming. Since the GoPro uses a two-button system to access all the settings, you have to cycle through every option to move around the menus or exit the screen. Also, the GoPro HD HERO2 lacks the built in Wi-Fi or Bluetooth feature for using a remote viewfinder. In order to monitor a shot, you need to either buy the LCD or Wi-Fi back, or connect a monitor to the mini HDMI output, (which isn’t really an option in the half pipe). Lastly, much like the ION Air Pro, the image from the GoPro HD HERO2 is warm and slightly over-saturated, so it makes the process of matching footage from multiple formats more difficult. Still, the overall stability of the picture trumps the minor annoyances.

WIRED Variety of frame rates, including 120 fps. Limited rolling shutter effect. Access to all the settings using on-camera controls.

TIRED Oversized, plasticky build feels dated. Picture quality drops to 848 x 480 when shooting at 120 fps. Two-button menu navigation deflates your stoke.