It's easier than ever to show your friends exactly what you were thinking about when you made the questionable call to ride off that jump. These POV cameras attach to helmets, skis, bikes, boards, car hoods, bodies, and pets—basically anything you want to use to document your attempts at glory or YouTube infamy.
We went heli-skiing in the backcountry of Colorado’s Silverton Mountain to see how these five POV cams could hold up to the elements—and our abuse—and to determine which ones were best at capturing the action without interrupting it.
Photo: Jens Mortensen
1. Contour GPS
Even before Contour began offering enhancements for your movies like GPS tagging—location, altitude, and speed—the 5-year-old company had already solved the most irksome thing about helmet cams by replacing the Record button with a giant raised slider switch. Even with thick ski gloves on, you can confidently start and stop recording by feel.
There's another trick to helmet cams: Not only are you shooting without benefit of a viewfinder, but you also often can't see the camera at all. So lining up shots can be difficult. Contour helps here, with a pair of lasers that project at the same vectors as the edges of the frame. Make sure the action is within the two red dots, and you're good to go.
The camera itself is a 4.4-ounce self-contained unit that shoots 1080p at 30 frames per second or, for slo-mo action, 720p at 60 fps. It mounts on an adhesive pad that sticks permanently to most helmets and holds a patch of industrial-strength Velcro that actually holds the camera via a grooved track. As long as you give the adhesive the chance to stick overnight, it should hold. We ran into a few problems with the camera jiggling free of the track in some high-impact scenarios (falls), but otherwise it all held.
Other mounts are available for things like handlebars, ski poles, and standard tripods.
Battery life averaged about five hours during a heli-skiing trip in the winter cold of Colorado's San Juan mountains, provided we remembered to turn it off at lunch and while waiting at landing zones.
WIRED No-look switch and easy shot framing without removing your helmet. New app converts your Bluetooth smartphone into a viewfinder and controller for the unit.
TIRED Android users are all set, but iPhone users will have to buy a $30 ConnectView card to make the app talk to the camera. The lens captures a wide 110-degree perspective, but the short frame makes it hard to keep everything in view while the world is whizzing by. No waterproof housing available.
$350, Contour
2. VIO POV.HD
When you see helmet-cam footage in ski and snowboard films, odds are it came from the POV, which favors reliability over versatility. The burly, pro-level 1080p unit uses a heavy A/V cable to connect the 142-degree lens to a handheld monitor/control unit. No futzing with Bluetooth or fancy add-ons. Just a serious camera that will help you quickly set up the shot and then instantly play it back as confirmation.
Even the attachment points rely on screws and single-use zip-ties rather than adhesives. They're more work. The upside is that once the camera is locked in, you know it's not going anywhere. The downside is you're carrying all that extra hardware, in addition to the monitor, which is about the same size as a handheld radio.
Because it's all hard-wired, you've got to decide whether the monitor gets strapped into your pack, which makes removing the pack difficult, or dropped into a pocket, with wires poking out everywhere. In practice, these aren't terribly difficult issues to overcome, but this camera definitely isn't something you're going to forget you're wearing. On more than one occasion during our test, we buckled that A/V cord into the helicopter seatbelt and got hung up trying to exit. Rookie move.
Some people won't like the VIO powered by four AA batteries, but we love it. No matter where you run out of juice, you can always pop a new set in without waiting for a USB charger.
WIRED The whole rig, from lens to controls, is shock resistant and waterproof to 3 feet— no housing required.
TIRED The pins on the threaded HDMI cable connection are delicate. Once they're bent, you're screwed.
$600, VIO
3. GoPro HeroCam HD
The original all-weather self-aggrandizer now comes in a 1080p model that allows you to switch to 720p and bump the frame rate up to an action-slowing 60 frames per second.
Each HeroCam comes standard with a waterproof housing that sheds snow and ice as well as it does waves (it's a favorite of surfers). Our test unit survived a 1,000-foot tumble of Telluride's 13,320-foot Palmyra Peak.
Of course, if the adhesive mounts were up to snuff, we wouldn't have had an opportunity to test the camera's durability quite that extensively. Mounting in general is a pain, actually. The camera's clunky box design requires a veritable erector set of swing arms and doohickeys to mount to anything.
One exception to this is the Chesty, an elastic harness that goes over your jacket uses only a single large plastic plate to stabilize the camera. For almost any sport, your chest is going to be the most stable part of your body, while your head tends to bob around.
The hardware and software interfaces are tricky, though. Two tiny buttons control a three-character LCD readout that seems to be written in a combination of Cyrillic and hieroglyphics. Good luck figuring out what a flashing "5" means while you're in a snowstorm or paddling out in overhead surf.
WIRED The 170-degree fish-eye lens is the best around for mounting on a surfboard, ski pole, or car hood to shoot back at yourself.
TIRED Changing settings on the GoPro, or even learning how to start recording, will inevitably lead to a lot of two-second movies of you staring into the lens with a confused look on your face.
$300, GoPro
4. Looxcie
As a design object the Looxcie makes the grade, with clean lines and a soft matte finish. As a camera/Bluetooth headset, not so much.
Though it can shoot 30-frame-per-second VGA footage, the same as the forward-facing camera on an iPhone 4, and store up to an hour, it's ostensibly for recording 15fps HVGA footage of important life events.
It does this by running a five-hour buffer and storing it in-unit. If anything notable happens during that time—a tennis match, your kids' soccer game, a co-worker talking smack about your boss—you can go back in and extract the proof, then email it to grandma or trade it with said co-workers for things of value.
The videos are small enough to send quickly via cell networks—30 seconds is under 2mb—but they're also unbearably lo-res. Yes, the tradeoff over a superior smartphone camera is wearability. But if the resulting video is unwatchable, why bother?
WIRED Also works as a Bluetooth headset, allowing you to make and receive calls.
TIRED Many of those calls will be to tech support. We spent a lot of time on the phone with them before we were able to record a single frame.
You're not exactly hiding the fact that you're wearing a camera with this, but you're not really advertising it, either. So don't be surprised if people start avoiding you; you've been sneaking up on them with a running camera.
$200, Looxcie
5. Liquid Image Summit Series HD
The problem with trying to integrate a video camera into a pair of snow goggles is that you risk creating a device that's mediocre on both counts. And while Liquid Image's Summit Series goggle is a good first stab at marrying these two products, it so compromises the user's peripheral vision that it's almost unwearable.
Goggles, remember, are really important in a sport where the world moves by you—or at you—at high speed, and mistakes can lead to injury.
The flashing record light, situated right between your eyes, is just visible enough to be completely distracting while trying to execute sick moves on the slopes. Meanwhile, the video is a disappointing 720x480 resolution in a world where 1080p is now considered standard, and the still camera shoots smallish 5 MB jpegs. (The updated HD 1080P model hits retail shelves in October and will cost $400.)
Operation is easy, though, which is nice given the high-speed, low-visibility settings this is intended for. The camera's two buttons are an on-off/mode switch and a record/shutter button. A long press on the power button gets you going; a short press toggles between still and video modes, which are indicated by blue and red LED lights on the top of the goggles. So all you have to worry about is not crashing (which, again, will be a bit more challenging while wearing these).
WIRED Unlike helmet- or harness-mounted cameras, the Liquid Image goggles are guaranteed to shoot exactly where you're looking. Proof that you don't have to wear a dorky appendage if you want to film POV shots of your runs.
TIRED Instead of the mini-USB cable that every other gadget in the world uses for charging and downloading footage, this camera relies on an RCA cable. Have fun finding a replacement. Until they partner with a serious eyewear maker like Smith or Oakley for the goggle half of the equation, we'd sooner buy Steve Martin's Opti-Grab invention from The Jerk.
$250, Liquid Image