Our first impressions
A well presented box much like the DC-1, 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!
The Camera and Specs
So firstly this camera is light! and we mean light! its only 95 grams so adding to perhaps an already heavy helmet is not going to be an issue at all.
This camera has the same fittings as its bigger brother, the DC-1, utilising the same tried and tested mounts and brackets. These look to be borrowed from a GoPro which is great as we are sure lots and lots of people have these mounts lying around their houses, so these won’t be wasted.
The camera can record in:
2K @ 30fps or Full 1080 HD @ 60fps so there is something for everyone here.
The camera is really easy to use too which is one of the most essential things for a camera, especially for bikers, as we don’t want to be fumbling around trying to sort a camera out when we are riding, we want to set it and forget it, and this cameras certainly fits that criteria.
Turning on is as simple as pressing and holding the power button and you will get a really good vibration feedback to let you know its on. As soon as you turn it on, the camera defaults to recoding mode, so if you didn’t want to use the app, you are good to go at this point!
When we started the camera, the wifi and power led’s were flashing alternatively and we found that out SC Card could not be read. This is a normal warning from the camera, and great it did this as you then need to press the power button 5 times quickly and it will format the card and then its all good. (It says this in the manual too, so don’t worry).
If you want to use an app with the camera, this will allow you to change some of the device settings and allow you to test you have mount the camera in the optimal position with the live view feature. It also allows you to review old footage, format the SD Card as well and download your footage. You can also buy an additional remote control to help you save footage from an incident etc. You can of course do this by pressing the button when riding too.
Heading over to your App Store you download the recommended app, and this case it is the Viidure app. This is strange as the DC-1 uses a different app, whereas this feels like a generic app, but with that said it does everything you would need it to do.
Then it’s just a case of connecting your phone via Wifi to it using the default password 12345678 (which you can change later and you probably should).
It doesn’t take long to download recording either, or you could pop the SD Card into a computer and review them that way too.
The battery life is about 3.5 hours on a full battery although you can extend this to about 10 hours on an external power bank, then you are just constrained by your SD Card, unless you have it on loop recording!
We mounted the camera to Mark’s BMW F850 GSA on the screen extension, which wasn’t the steadiest although the camera seemed to cope really well. An area less prone to vibrations would be better but like we said, it coped very well indeed.
Quality of the recordings
So after using the DC-1 we had high hopes for the XV-1, and it didn’t disappoint! It worked seamlessly and the footage was as good as the DC-1 probably as it has the same SONY IMX307 sensor.
The colours again seemed really really nice meaning that we didn’t have to colour correct it in post production, although the colours were a little muted in comparison to the DC-1, not sure why that it, but the XV-1 had great image quality, great colours and a lot of detail in the footage too.
Conclusion
We thought that this unit is fairly priced currently UK at £179.95 but is the same price as the DC-1, so whilst this camera is great, we would go for the DC-1 as it has dual cameras and a better app.
With that said though, some people will not want to record behind them and will want a dedicated camera for recording what they are doing and this certainly fits the bill.
Like the DC-1, 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.
A great camera indeed although for the same price you can get the DC-1 with a remote control rather than buying a remote control to add to the XV-1. Which ever you chose you won’t regret it!
You can also get a 5% discount using code RCTV at checkout too! so that’s even more reason to get one!