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Tuesday, October 11, 2011

ReplayXD 1080 POV Camera

I've been interested in doing some in car video work for some time, and in the past I've experimented with a Canon Legria FS-200 and a Camzilla mount(you can check out that post here). Recently I came across the ReplayXD line of cameras, in particular, the ReplayXD 1080. After checking out some footage of the Poteet and Main streamliner at Bonneville, and a number of other videos on the web, I decided that I had to have one of these cameras.


I've now had the camera in my possession for a little over a week, and have yet to put it inside a race car, instead I've been testing it out in my daily driver, a VN Calais. The results so far are fairly promising, with the Camzilla clamp and ReplayXD 1080 combination proving very stable (on a road car at least). I've put a couple of videos up on YouTube, which are most likely not going to be of much interest to anyone, but they give you an idea of the cameras capabilities. (That said, I have yet to start tweaking the advanced settings, which may yield some further improvement)


The video above is also a drive through of the roadworks currently in progress to widen the Kwinana Freeway from Leach Highway to Roe Highway. The road works to date seem to have focussed on moving the traffic away from work areas, starting with narrowing the lanes to provide room to work safely on the side of the freeway itself, and lately there has been work to modify the on and off ramps to move traffic away from where work will be done on to realign those ramps to suit the new freeway width. So far, I have to say, the traffic is flowing remarkably well in both directions, with a permanent 80kmh speed limit in place until the road works are complete, during the peak times, the traffic is moving just as well as it did before the roadworks commenced.


The last video on this page is taking the ReplayXD 1080 away from it's comfort zone. I had the camera in the Camzilla clamp, resting on the wall of the Hankook Tyre Snake Pit at the Perth Motorplex. Between taking photos of the burnouts, I would move the camera to suit what was going on out on the pad. Night performance has always been the biggest challenge for a POV camera, and using the camera as a handicam makes it even more challenging, so this is a chance to see what could reasonably be expected to be the worst footage you'll get out of one of these cameras. All up, I'm quite happy with this purchase, between the clamp and the camera, I have less than $450 invested in the setup, thanks to the strength of the Aussie dollar in recent months.

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