Our first impressions
A well presented box with lots and lots of accessories inside to help you mount the camera to any helmet, be it motorcycle helmets, horse riding helmets or indeed attaching to your motorcycle too!
Made of solid material it is very lightweight and with minimal buttons it will allow the easy functions to be set before you ride!
The Camera and Specs
When this unit was released it was the world’s first dual lens motorbike helmet camera that employed recording from both front and rear. This has obviously led to copies appearing but Techalogic were the first!
Originally built to fit a gap for motorcyclists as there is a whole range or cameras that you can get to fit to your motorbike or helmet, although with the invention of the dual lens system it lends itself not only to motorcyclists, but to cyclists and horse riders and we are sure many more people too.
Setting up was simple, install an SD Card (Techalogic offer different options here, although we used our SanDisk card which seem to work well), charge it up with the supplied cable and then you are ready to use it.
Turning it on is easy with just a long tap on the power button which defaults to recording mode out of the box, so if that’s as much as you wanted, you are good to go!
Once you turn it on you get a great vibration feedback to let you know it’s on.
You will need the app if you want to change the camera settings, review or download the footage so that’s easy, navigate to your phone and head over to your App Store, download the RoadCam app and then connect the wifi with the supplied password (generic 12345678).
This worked first time for us and when we fired the app up it showed us a current preview and allowed us to change setting such as time and date, formats, times for the loop recording and other basic functions.
As this connects to the 2.4GhZ network its easy to download your footage to your phone to view later or you could pop the SD Card out and read it on your computer, but this day and age, who doesn’t like an app!?
The app whilst basic allows you to navigate it with ease and to be honest that’s one of the charms of the app, being simple to use makes it easy to not have to remember intricate methods to use it, especially if something happens on the road that you need the footage of quickly.
The battery life is about 2.5 hours and this can be extended to 7.5 hours with the use of a power bank (of which Techalogic sell), but any power bank will do!
Mounting it to our helmet was easy with the supplied fittings. They have employed much the same kits as GoPro (actually they look the same) so any GoPro bits you have lying around at home will work and allow you to configure the mountings as you need them.
You could also use this camera mounted to the bike too, providing a really good quality dashcam at a great price. Used with the supplied remote control, its easy to take pictures or to protect a recording so it won’t get overwritten, giving you peace of mind when riding that ‘that incident is captured’ for when you need it later.
The Specs of the camera:
- Dual Lens
- SONY Starvis IMX307 Sensor
- Codec .265
- Seamless loop recording
- 1600mAh battery giving 2.5 hours for dual recording (can be extended with a powerbank)
- Only 104g in weight
Quality of the recordings
This is where the camera shines! The quality of the recording from both front and rear cameras are really really good. The one thing we noticed was that the colours really pop, much like a Samsung phone does. For some this may seem over colourful, but we thought it looked great and it meant we didn’t need to do any colour grading in post production. The definition of the video is good and this allows you to see everything in great detail.
The default recording is:
Front: 1080FHD @ 30fps Rear: 1080FHD @ 30fps
but you can set other resolutions too such as 720P @60fps on both or 2K (1440) @ 30fps on the front with the rear off, so plenty for anyone really.
We found that the quality of the microphone was lacking a little but aren’t all cameras that are subject to a lot of wind noise, especially when riding at speed? So for horse riders etc, this won’t be an issue, although for motorcycle riders on the move, you will need another audio source for videos (in post production) but having said that, if you are at an incident without the wind noise (at an accident etc and stood around) the mic will be perfectly fine.
Conclusion
We thought that this unit although priced currently in 2022 at £179.95 in the UK might seem pricey to some, it really isn’t.
You are getting a lot of top quality stuff in this small package, from a reliable, easy to use camera to a camera that will mount to almost anything and allow you to loop record, record those tour memories or to attach to your bike as dash cam, it’s really versatile indeed.
We really liked this camera for the simple reason that you can charge it, attach it and set it and forget it, but if something great happens on your ride or bad for that matter, the touch of a button on the remote allows you to save it for later.
A great camera indeed.
You can also get a 5% discount using code RCTV at checkout too! so that’s even more reason to get one!