dc chavez – the BLOG

So the other day I ran into an old friend that does some work with Contour Cameras. He mentioned he had seen some of my videos and wanted to equip me with some of the latest and greatest POV cams on the market. I gladly accepted and looked forward to seeing what these cameras could do and how they compared to my Sony XHR-MC1 POV camera. The street price of $329.95 made these a lot more user friendly than the Sony- which cost about 10 times more than one of these cameras.

A few days later I had a knock at the door from the UPS man with 3 pretty large boxes for me. I was FLOORED when I opened the boxes and saw TONS of goodies from Contour Cam. Here is what the spread looked like:

Contour HD 1080P & Accessories

6 cams and tons of accessories as you can see. Here is a breakdown of what comes included in the box with the camera:

Contour HD 1080P Unboxing

Each box comes with the camera, battery, instruction manual, charger / PC cable, flat mount and extra adhesive pad. As you can see, the camera itself is TINY, smaller than my iPhone…

Contour HD vs iPhone

You can access the cameras battery and micro SD memory card from the back as well as adjust the resolution of the camera from HI (1920×1080 @ 30fps) to LOW (1280 x 960 @ 30fps). Once you hit the power button on the back of the cam, on the top of the camera there is only one switch to start the recording.

The back of the camera

Black means not recording

Red means recording

So once I turned the camera on I was delighted to see two little laser beams shoot out. Since the camera has no display, the lasers help to make sure the camera is aligned with what you are trying to shoot.

Sharks with laser beams on their heads

Sharks with laser beams on their heads

Now that I was familiar with the camera, it was time to dive into the mountain of accessories for the cam. I started off with the one that comes with each camera- a flat surface mount. The camera is has these cool looking grooves heading down the side, but it turns out they are fully functional- the mounting place for all of the various holders. Its called the TRail mount system. I slid the flat mount in and slid it all the way forward to make sure it was locked into place. I later mounted this on the side of my helmet to get some POV karting action- more on that later…

Sliding the flat mount into place

The next package was the lens kit. With all of the automotive video that I do I tend to use filters for various reasons: a polarizer to cut the glare on the car or windshield, and a UV filter to protect the lens from getting pitted from debris on the track. This kit has replacement lens ring, lenses as well as step up rings for a 37mm screw-in filter. It all fits in a neat little bag and easily tossed in with the rest of the gear.

Contour HD Filter Kit

Contour HD Filter Kit

The next item in the bag is the handlebar mount. The cool thing about this and the camera is that you can mount it just about anywhere. The camera lens twists 90 degrees from vertical so you can mount the camera horizontal! You can see in this picture that the lens is still upright even though the camera is on its side.

Contour HD Handlebar Mount

Whle we are talking about biking, this next accessory is designed to strap a camera to your typical vented helmet. The straps go through the helmet and cinch down so the camera stays snug and your ride through the trails.

Contour HD Vented Helmet Mount

This next accessory is something I was really looking forward to- the Universal Mount 1/4″ x 20 threaded adapter. This slides on around the camera and gives a mounting point that will work with most of my grip gear such as Manfrotto superclamps, magic arms etc. Like the other mounting kits, it slides right on around the camera and is ready to go.

Contour HD Universal Mount

Contour HD Universal Mount

This next one is something I have a feeling I am going to use a lot- the windshield mount. This adjustable suction cup will attach the camera to a windshield or any other body panel and allow you to lock the camera into any angle you like. Being that I shoot a lot of automotive videos, this bad boy is going to come in handy- OFTEN…

Contour HD Windshield Mount

Another item I was excited to see was a case to carry the camera in. This holds the camera on one side as well as cables, extra memory cards and batteries with room to spare. It makes it easy to transport all this stuff around without having to worry too much about it getting banged up. It also has a carabiner attached so you can easily clip it onto a backpack or something.

Contour HD Carrying Case

Contour HD Carrying Case

The guys at Contour were nice enough to send spare batteries, USB battery charger, wall chargers, car chargers and a bunch of extra sticky pads for the flat surface mount.

Contour HD USB Battery Charger

Contour HD Car Charger

Contour HD Wall Charger

Phew- thats a lot of gear… Once I finally sorted through all of this stuff, it was time to take it out on the town and do something with it. I headed down to K1Speed in Torrance to put em to the test. I mounted two cameras on the car and one on my helmet for three races. Here is what I was able to come up with for our first spin out there…

Nothing too crazy, but I was impressed with the low-light performance and low-vibration from these cameras. I have used other CMOS-based POV cams and they tend to get “wonky” around the edges under heavy vibration. I am very impressed with these cameras and look forward to putting them through their paces in the near future!