Helmet cam (final evaluation)
This weekend, I had the pleasure of reffing the Atlanta Dirty South Derby Girls vs. Steel City Steel Hurtin’ bout, as well as the ARG intraleague Apocalypstix vs Toxic Shocks bout. This was going to be the first time I would get real world experience with the Tachyon XC helmet cam. Let’s pick up where we left off.
I received my replacement camera pretty quickly. I went to attach it to my helmet and had many issues. I was finding no way to securely mount the camera. I emailed Tachyon, Inc. asking for mounting advice. As I sit here writing this, I have still not received a response.
I eventually decided to use one of the provided mounts with a combination of the velcro and elastic strap (both provided). The elastic strap had to be wrapped around the mount and through holes in my helmet many times in order to keep it from bouncing too much. I would not call it a very secure mount. I spent close to an hour trying to get it aimed properly. I then put it away until we got to Atlanta.
When it came time to use the camera, the beeping to let you know that it was turned on and then to let you know recording has started was not loud enough for me to know if the button presses were accepted. The venue was fairly loud, but the camera was only a few inches from my ears. This wouldn’t be much of a concern if the buttons weren’t so difficult to press and need to be held down for a few seconds before the button press registers. This was a design choice to prevent accidental button presses and to keep the camera waterproof. Because of this, it almost hurt to push the buttons as hard as necessary and the button presses still don’t always register. This difficulty would be fine, had I been able to hear that the button press had registered. It also would have been fine if it had not been for the next problem I ran into.
The camera has two led lights in it. There is a green led to indicate the unit is powered on and a red led to indicate that you are recording. I had explained to other people how those lights work. I was randomly told that the light was green, when I knew it should have been red. In other words, the camera randomly stopped recording. Sometimes it would stop after only a minute or two; sometimes it would be 20 minutes later. The only way that I could tell that the camera had stopped recording on its own was to either take off my helmet, or have someone tell me.
So before the event was over, I was fairly dissatisfied with the camera. That would only be the beginning of my disappointment, as I had not yet seen the resulting video.
I connected the camera to my laptop to take a look at what I had gotten. The first thing I noticed was that the image was quite grainy. The low light performance was poor. The venue where the bouts were located wasn’t very bright, but I still would have liked to see a better picture in that light setting.
The next thing I noticed was the sound. It was totally unacceptable. I had expected poor sound due to the waterproofing, but nothing like this. The sound was cutting out probably once or twice a second. More than that, during one-on-one official reviews, you could barely even hear the person I was talking to or myself. What you were able to hear, you couldn’t even tell who was talking.
Also, the video isn’t worth watching because my mount went totally out of calibration. It was aimed too high. When I was looking down at skates, the camera was looking at the top of helmets. It was aimed too far in front of the skater I was watching, but this was probably due to my own miscalculation. If the mount had been more secure, it couldn’t have shifted as it had.
In closing, the only thing that I like about this camera is the construction of the back of the camera. The back door latches securely, which makes it feel like it was well engineered. The battery compartment made me feel confident that the batteries would not become dislodged during use. Outside of that, the camera is not worth anywhere near what I paid for it. If I were to put a price on the Tachyon XC (without memory card), I wouldn’t pay more than $25 for it.