I get asked this all the time so I'll sticky it.
The Helmet Camera (Helcam)
I bought my helmet mounted camera from
http://www.helmetcameras.com.au/
And I bought what they call their Six Day pack. Unusual name but that's what I got.
Quote:
"SIX DAY" is a 580 line Sony based camera system with all the features of the top of the line "killer".. excellent colour reproduction, the fastest aperture shifting camera in it's class and broadcast quality reproduction.
580 line waterproof SONY super HAD CCD colour camera with sunhood
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Now you have to know that in Australia we use the PAL system. Our standard cameras shoot at 576 pixels verticle resolution not 480 pixels like NTSC from USA.
More info about that here.
So I chose a matching helmet camera.
The helmet camera has excellent colour and light/shade reproduction, better then the video camera itself. There's different degrees of lenses as far as wide angles go ... I just got their most popular one and it doesn't compress too much at all.
The actual bullet camera that velcro's to where ever is only around 20mm dia and 75mm long. It has a little sun hood thing which did put a round shadow on the corners of the picture so I filed it off.
You'll notice in
this video of Graeme's that the very corners have a slight rounding, that's the bits I filed off. Also you'll notice the wider angle lense he has really "bubbles" the tree trunk out. So these are things you need to be aware of.
Also a small mono mic which is pretty sensitive is connected, I just have this taped to the bullet cam and connected to left channel audio, I could connect it to both but I like to put music on the clips.
The Camcorder
First of all the model I use takes mini DV tape. There's models that burn direct to disc, store on hard drives etc but so far the best recording medium is digi tape and that's from the pro's telling me.
My camera is a Sony DCR-TRV15E PAL about 4 years old now. About 2 years ago a customer accidently knocked it off a balcony and it fell about 10' onto gravel/stones ... damaged the heads. I took it to the Sony repair guy and looked new models over when he gave me the news, $550 to fix! Now you can buy new cameras for that much but I didn't ... coz the new cheap cameras dont stack up with features or the strength as this one has a lot of metal in it.
So the camera was repaired and hasn't missed a beat since. This camera in the field gets some rough treatment. Heat, dust, vibration and the occasional dropping and wetting! But it cranks on, tough.
I like Sony's for camcorders. If I were to buy a new one it would be a Sony HD top end job around $2k here.
The picture below shows the connections it has.
The best feature is the LANC controller, a Sony and Canon only feature. What the rave about this feature is when you plug in the helcam you plug a little thumb operated controller into here.
A green light indicates power on and standby. A red light indicates recording in progress An alternating green/red blinking light indicates low battery and warns you when you have less than 5 minutes left on the tape. A blinking red light indicates that the camera is in PHOTO mode or in other ways not yet ready for recording.
When climbing trees and using the helcam, I have a camel pack on my back which has the camcorder, battery pack for helcam etc in it ... out of that camel pack comes a little wire with the thumb controller to turn off/on for taping.