The search queries tend to be regarding its compatibility with Mac's.

The short answer is that yes. These are compatible with Mac's. If you hook it up to your mac using the supplied USB cable, the camera will mount as an external drive and you can just import videos as normal.

The problem is that you can't do much with the videos, and so I'm just going to give you a little step-by-step guide to how I process the files.

Getting the files

First up, do yourself a huge favour and pick up an SD-Card reader. This is far quicker then transferring using the camera directly, and has a 2nd advantage of not draining the cameras batteries.

Imply drag and drop into your desired folder.

Viewing / Editing Files

I can't be 100% certain of this as things my have changed with newer releases. However, when I first got my camera Quicktime would not recognise the .avi file at all. It wasn't until i'd installed the VLC player that it would play the files. I guess that VLC must install a couple of its own codecs.

However, lets take a look at that file size - 370.9MB is a tad on the large side. I tend to recompress my files using VisualHub - one of the best pieces of software available on the Mac today in my opinion. The makers of VisualHub also make iSquint, which is VH's baby brother but had the advantage of being freeware.

I convert to H.264 as I know that iMovie can handle this nicely. It will also look noticeably better if you upload to youtube then the original file.

As you can see, this now comes down to a much more manageable 126.2MB and since its in H.264, you know its going to work with whatever video editor you choose.

And heres the finished example on Youtube.

Conclusions

Its a little hard to be totally enthusiastic about this camera. Its fun, but the lack of Mac support makes it less convenient then it should be to get the files into your media editor.

Picture quality is on a par with the kind of clips your digital camera produces, and can struggle with darkness and high contrast. See the sky being whited out as I go down the hill in the video. Occasionally vibrations can cause this strange 'waving' effect. Kind of like a flag in the wind. Its also worth remembering that there is no image stablisation on the camera. With a helmet camera your likely to be filming some quite active scenes. The body will absorb some movement, but if you are attaching it to something solid like handlebars or forks, then I'd recommend placing some foam or rubber underneath the mount. Sound quality is pretty awful as you can tell on the video. The range of the mic is only a couple of feet, and the gain is low - hence the tearing noises on the video. I originally put this down to the exhaust being too loud on the bike. But I've had the same problem with the camera attached to my Electric powered RC car.

So far I've sounded pretty negative about the camera, but it does have its good points. First off, it is a rugged unit. It been attached to my RC car, and survived crashes unscathed. Its also waterproof, so no worries about rain and mud. Also as its a self contained unit, there are no wires to worry about, just stick on whatever you want to film and off you go. The price is a little steep (especially in the UK) and the video is a little disappointing. However, the ability to film situations you'd never take your expensive DV camera into more then makes up for it.

To be honest, I keep trying to think of things I can use the camera for so I can get more cool footage.

If you can live with the quirks, and image quality is not massively important then this is a cool little camera.

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