Eugene
New member
I've been wanting to set up something like a dash-cam on my bike for a while, and after a bunch of research I decided to try the mobius action cam (which can be found here https://www.mobius-actioncam.com/ )
My requirements were:
* It had to be relatively small
* I could "set it and forget it". Meaning, it had to:
* Have automatic start record on power-on
* Be able to record while plugged into power (duh)
* Have continuous loop recording - meaning, as the memory card gets full, the oldest files get deleted automatically
* Not break the bank because I'm cheap
The mobius action cam was one of a very few models I found on the market that actually checked all of those boxes. The only other ones that seemed to have somewhat comparable features were the ones made by inovv - and those had some questionable reviews online.
As an added bonus it also has a few other things I liked about it:
* It still has an internal battery and can run for a few hours without being plugged in
* It is highly configurable and can be set to either push to record or automatic-on mode. You can even tell it to flip the video 180 degrees depending on how it's mounted, and has 2 modes that you can toggle between which you can pre-configure for resolution, frame-rate, etc.
* Has a lot of different mounting options
* Has a wide-angle lens option.
* Cost me $120 which included a 16GB SD card, wide angle lens, and 3 different mounts (helmet, handle-bar, magnetic, clip-on, and sticky ones). I just ordered a 128GB card for $40 to get me to 16 hours of video.
* Has a decent built-in mic (no noise filtering for wind, though)
Note: Apparently there is an android app available for this cam that makes it less of a nightmare to configure, and also lets you use it as a viewer for what the cam is seeing, but I haven't tried it.
Now, the not-so-good:
* Configuring it was pain. Like WTF-why-would-anyone-design-anything-this-way-painful. It is definitely not what I would consider user friendly. If you are not computer-savvy, I do no recommend this product. I think their windows configuration app might be a bit better, but as a mac user I had to resort to editing a very strange configuration text file to get the camera behaving the way I wanted it to. Probably took me like ~2 hours to configure it right, and I'm a software engineer.
* Their website & purchasing experience looks like it was built by a 16 year old kid in 2002.
* The picture quality is so-so - you can check out my sample video below. Now, this might also be a factor of how it's configured. I have its dynamic lighting thing on, which is supposed to make it better in dark environments (haven't tried it at night yet), but the sky and other bright elements looked really washed out. This was recorded at 1080p 24fps - 30fps is also available but I chose 24fps to fit more onto the card. I also have the wide-angle lense on it.
* The waterproof sleeve is not very useful because it doesn't have a cut-out for the USB power source so I'd probably have to hack it up if I want to use it.
Ok, onto the pics and video. I am not sure if this is the final mounting place for the cam yet, but I decided to try and mounting it to my steering damper under my headlight assembly:
Front:
Side:
And here is the sample video where you can see me do some city streets and some highway:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63s5Q62Yfu0
Overall, my verdict is that it was a pretty good buy. I think there's a lot for the $$. If you really care about the video quality itself, this may not be the best product for you. My main use case for having this is an additional layer of liability protection, and maybe catch some cool ride moments / track day footage as a nice bonus.
My requirements were:
* It had to be relatively small
* I could "set it and forget it". Meaning, it had to:
* Have automatic start record on power-on
* Be able to record while plugged into power (duh)
* Have continuous loop recording - meaning, as the memory card gets full, the oldest files get deleted automatically
* Not break the bank because I'm cheap
The mobius action cam was one of a very few models I found on the market that actually checked all of those boxes. The only other ones that seemed to have somewhat comparable features were the ones made by inovv - and those had some questionable reviews online.
As an added bonus it also has a few other things I liked about it:
* It still has an internal battery and can run for a few hours without being plugged in
* It is highly configurable and can be set to either push to record or automatic-on mode. You can even tell it to flip the video 180 degrees depending on how it's mounted, and has 2 modes that you can toggle between which you can pre-configure for resolution, frame-rate, etc.
* Has a lot of different mounting options
* Has a wide-angle lens option.
* Cost me $120 which included a 16GB SD card, wide angle lens, and 3 different mounts (helmet, handle-bar, magnetic, clip-on, and sticky ones). I just ordered a 128GB card for $40 to get me to 16 hours of video.
* Has a decent built-in mic (no noise filtering for wind, though)
Note: Apparently there is an android app available for this cam that makes it less of a nightmare to configure, and also lets you use it as a viewer for what the cam is seeing, but I haven't tried it.
Now, the not-so-good:
* Configuring it was pain. Like WTF-why-would-anyone-design-anything-this-way-painful. It is definitely not what I would consider user friendly. If you are not computer-savvy, I do no recommend this product. I think their windows configuration app might be a bit better, but as a mac user I had to resort to editing a very strange configuration text file to get the camera behaving the way I wanted it to. Probably took me like ~2 hours to configure it right, and I'm a software engineer.
* Their website & purchasing experience looks like it was built by a 16 year old kid in 2002.
* The picture quality is so-so - you can check out my sample video below. Now, this might also be a factor of how it's configured. I have its dynamic lighting thing on, which is supposed to make it better in dark environments (haven't tried it at night yet), but the sky and other bright elements looked really washed out. This was recorded at 1080p 24fps - 30fps is also available but I chose 24fps to fit more onto the card. I also have the wide-angle lense on it.
* The waterproof sleeve is not very useful because it doesn't have a cut-out for the USB power source so I'd probably have to hack it up if I want to use it.
Ok, onto the pics and video. I am not sure if this is the final mounting place for the cam yet, but I decided to try and mounting it to my steering damper under my headlight assembly:
Front:
Side:
And here is the sample video where you can see me do some city streets and some highway:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63s5Q62Yfu0
Overall, my verdict is that it was a pretty good buy. I think there's a lot for the $$. If you really care about the video quality itself, this may not be the best product for you. My main use case for having this is an additional layer of liability protection, and maybe catch some cool ride moments / track day footage as a nice bonus.
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