Samsung's MPEG4 Sports Camcorder offers the ability to capture those thrlling moments. Whether you're snow boarding or skiing or just having fun with the family you can capture the moment with the remote lens.
1 Good for its intented purpose
I plan to use the Samsung sc-x105l for cycling (MTB, Road and Motorcycle) trips. I've had the unit a few days and familiarized myself with the controls. Fumbling for setup and features is always a battery burner so I try to be proficient before giving a real-life judgement on battery life.
I did a road bicycle test yesterday in 56 degree weather, starting with a full charge (I had cycled the battery once prior to this), the image quality was set for 352 dpi at "normal". Two higher quality settings are available this is the lowest and most battery efficient. Electronic Image Stabilization was turned on which also uses more power. The LCD display door was closed and I used the external remote camera.
According to the manual, I should have gotten ~80 .minutes, the varible was the EIS, there is no mention of how much that lowers battery life. My actual battery life was 48 minutes. About half of what the manual stated.
Image quality at 352/normal was fair. When a car zipped past me, the image was not clear enough to read a license plate from 30 ft away during playback, even going frame by frame. Recording at higher resolution should help this but more testing required.
The good news was how much of the 512mb internal memory I had used in 48 minutes, which was only 95mb. I feel by increasing the resoltuion (which uses way more memory and some battery) an equal amount of memory and battery can be consumed yielding about 30 minutes of quality video.
30 minutes may not sound like much but frankly, 30 minutes of home moives is usually more than most people can take. I'll carry a spare battery and 1G memory stick top tranfer during longer trips.
BTW, the unit is amazingly small and light, build quality is sturdy. That is a big plus for the intended audience of this unit.
2 Wait for Improvements
I was very excited to receive this camera. My intent was to use it for skydiving video, after all I first saw the advert for it in Parachutist magazine. Anyway, I had it for about 1 week before I sent it back. It went through batteries very quickly and captured relatively grainy and dark video and stills. It takes several seconds to ready for video or stills and if I kept it in the ready mode for too long (20 min) the battery was about gone! The lense provided a pretty narrow field of view. It is good for standard back yard applications but as an "extreme sports cam" it is not ready for the quick and constant action of up close "extreme sports". Only the external optical cam eye is water resisitant. The rest of the cam will break if exposed to heavy moisture/rain/water. Another point of contention, I early purchased this unit from Amazon for $699. By the time it was delivered the price was already down to $569.00 from Amazon! Bottom line.....Wait till it is improved and the price settles down.
3 Slightly Disappointed
I wanted to use this product to document sports and other activities and expected that the video could show the times and dates when these activities were observed. However, although the camera has a time and date function, these items cannot be made to appear on the video.
The camcorder has a separate camera module for mounting on a helmet, etc., but the picture quality does not match that of the main camera, which makes use of the separate module inadequate for the purposes I had in mind when ordering this particular unit.
