GoPro Camera GoPro Helmet HERO Wide Set

I've been after a helmet cam for mountain biking and skiing for a while but was put off by most cams needing a recording device in your bag. The helmet hero has capacity for a 2GB SD card which gives just under an hours recording time. Although an hour doesn't sound long, for me its fine as I only want to record the fun bits of rides not the whole duration. At first I was clipping it on when a downhill section was ahead but I got annoyed having to stop to do this so I just left it on my head the rest of the time and its suprisingly light and unoticeable even on a lightweight helmet for 3hr+ rides. Once you get used to the buttons its easy to switch the cam on and then start recording without stopping, this way battery time isn't wasted. I got a set of NiMH rechargeables, didn't run out after three days of riding (cam only on when recording)
The video quality is pretty good and I found the camera was quite quick at adjusting the exposure when changing from sunny open areas to dark forest, haven't used it on snow but seen some vids of this and it seems to cope fine with the bright light. The picture is suprisingly smooth despite hammering down rocky singletrack. Still pictures are cool with the wide angle but view finding is tricky and there's no control over zoom and exposure which I wouldn't expect anyway as its designed mainly for video. The only dissapointment is the wide angle looses some perspective of distances and gradients making sections look tame and easy even if you remember feeling that a crash was immenant, but the plus of seeing more of the surroundings and not just the tyre far outweighs this.
Overall I'm chuffed with the cam, I can make videos of the sports me and my mates get up to that I can marvel at when I'm an OAP!

Great Quality images in decent light, not so great in poor light.

I stuck this little gem to the from of my snowboard, was -19c plus wind chill and it still recorded really good footage...unfortunately the sticky pad stickiness froze and it fell off half way down the black run, a short trek later I recovered the camera and it was in perfect working order.

Its quite tricky to mount properly, so make sure you have a helmet that will allow you to attach it properly or find some sticky pads that work better!

Going diving in June and intend to try it out at depth, I am going to need a very bright torch!

I purchased two Hero Wide cams a couple of weeks ago, and mounted them on a small yacht in order to capture onboard footage from the annual Round The Island Race. I had no previous experience of using the cameras, or any similar products, but got good results immediately. There is no way to review captured footage on the fly - the camera has to be connected to your computer or TV in order to play it back - but I found that I'd got good results just from using intuition about where to position and aim each camera.

As other people have mentioned, the relatively small file size that can be accomodated restricts footage to a total duration of just under an hour per 2GB SD card, but swapping cards was easy. Battery life was not an issue - each camera filmed for around 2 hours, on and off, and the batteries still had life left in them at the end. However, I was using Energiser Lithium batteries, which the manufacturers firmly recommend.

The cameras have been, for me at least, plug and play both on my IBM laptop and my MacBook Pro - no special software, plug-ins, etc required.

The product doesn't quite get 5 stars for a couple of reasons. First, the audio is so muffled as to be virtually non-existent. A manufacturer-endorsed workaround is to drill a hole in the waterproof casing - not recommended for surfing or sailing! Possibly viable for motorsports - but maybe wind noise would be an issue. Second, you need to work overtime on keeping the waterproof casing in front of the lens as clean as possible - at one stage, one of my camera casings receives a thumbrint which is very visible on the captured footage.

Finally - and this is no fault of the camera's - the footage, while of good quality and clarity when played back on a computer screen, involves mammoth file sizes. Don't expect to publish to YouTube or a blog at anything like that quality. That said, streamed quality over the web is acceptable.