Here is my old thread on the Contour HD from mid 2009. Since this, the Contour HD has grown to become a much better camera capable of doing 1080p and such. But here is the review:
I've been searching around for a cheap on-board HD camera to shoot some footage for a TV show pilot. In the process of doing research, I stumbled upon the Vhold products and one thing attracted me to them more then anyone else; compatibility...
One thing about these cheap cameras is; most of them use MP4 (MPEG) encoding. What sucks about MPEG is that you've gotta transcode everything before you edit it. I wanted something I could take the footage and throw it directly into FCP (final cut pro) and edit immediately. After having some initial talks with Vhold, they told me all about the HD product coming out in the summer, so I put one on hold and waited...
Last month (3 months after I ordered it) my new Contour HD camera arrived at my door step. I was happy, more like gitty! I built a few mounts for yee-ol motorcycle and the weekend after I received the camera, I started shooting. I soon found out, the camera has a few issues and they were a show-stopper for me. It turns out, the camera doesn't like MASSIVE vibrations. Every time I put it on the bike, it would shut it self off. So here I was with a camera that worked fine on a helmet, but not on a bike! After doing some research, I found out they make speciality mounts for these things, so I bought one. This 100% resolved the issues AND created some excellent pictures in the process.
What Vhold has done is make a handy, very nice camera for cheap ($279) which does both 1280x720 and 640x480 resolutions onto a mini-sd card. The on-off switch is a slider on the top, making it extremely easy to start/stop without looking at it. Also, built-in record light on the front and power/status lights on the back, make it very easy to determine if its working properly. A 180 degree adjustable lens comes standard. Mount the camera at 90 degree's off axis and twist the lens to compensate! This is a very kool feature and has saved my ass numerous times, its well thought-out.
So I shot for the first time this weekend and it worked flawlessly. You'll need a bigger SD card off the bat, the 2gb card is useless. Once you get that, the camera battery seemed to hold up all day w/o any issues and as you can tell from the final product it does WORK and look pretty decent. Is this camera a replacement for a 3 chip HD lipstick one? Nope, but its also not $2500 bux! You get what you pay for, so $279 is about what its worth. The picture quality is so-so, the audio is pretty bad and the functions are extremely limited, but it works! I took the USB cable, plugged it in and was editing within seconds after shooting. I literally had a temp cut of the short done in 5 minutes! The .h264 file format is mac/pc friendly and there is an application for both systems available to help manage your clips.
So here is my first test on the Contour HD. Mind you, I didn't wanna crash, so I took it SUPER easy...
Linear Mode
