Some Initial Thoughts on an Aldi Action Cam

I'm not really sure why I thought I needed an action cam, but Aldi were selling this one for £50 which seemed o have a decent spec and most everything I've bought from there has been quite all right, so I took the plunge.

I have a theory about devices like this - if I have to read the manual to carry out it's basic function then there's something wrong and it's not fit for purpose. Having got it out of it's box I shoved a memory card in (it's not supplied with one and won't work with out one) and switched it on. It protest about incorrect format of the SD card so I formatted as requested, poked a few buttons, swung it round the room and had my first video. Plugging a USB cable in it asked if I wanted charge mode or storage mode. I assumed storage mode so I could download it to the computer which worked fine. The one thing I didn't do, which I normally do with this sort of device, is reset it to factory mode. This showed when I looked at the video file which seemed to be quite huge for ten seconds of video. The video had been record at some ludicrously fast frame rate which my video editor struggled with. Factory rest set it to 4k 60fps, but I lowered it to 1080p 60fps even though I have screens capable of displaying 4k I reckon most people would view anything I published at 1080p or lower. The other thing I noticed, which worried me a bit, was the video wasn't as sharp as I'd expected. It was after I'd removed the protective film from the lens.

It comes in a case with a myriad of plastic bits for attaching to all sorts of things, but no bank stick adapter which isn't really surprising. Having charged it up I put it in it's waterproof case and put it in the sink to see if it was really waterproof. It was. I eventually found the tripod adapter and my spare bank stick adapter so I could mount it on the end of a landing net pole. 

While fishing a couple of days later I had a poke around the tree roots with it and tried the good old underwater fish release. These things are done blind as WiFi doesn't work under water so the remote viewing app for the phone won't work. I was surprise by the the images it got given the lack of clarity in the water. I did have it pointing the wrong way at one point and thought it wasn't working as all I got was a brown blur and not the tree roots. Although on little screens things often look better than the really are, they images were quite good on the computer screen at home. One problem though, everything was upside down. I'd managed to knock the rotate setting off probably because I kept prodding the screen and not the two buttons on the side when I was looking at the settings, My video editor managed to rotate it and the results can be seen below. Overall my initial impressions of the camera are quite good, the biggest learning curve is going to be editing.

I know I'm rather late to this action cam lark and a lot of you will know these things already, but I'm going to document my trials and tribulations with it in the hope that it will be of use to somebody even if that's just me.