The VIO POV 1.5 Review from Dendrite Studios
The VIO 1.5 is a top of the line helmet camera plain and simple. The image is clean and crisp. The unit is waterproof to 3 feet and shockproof. Rain in Whistler? Not an issue. Just tomahawked down Spankys? Check and still working fine.
The biggest advantage over the competitors is the VIO is a tethered unit. It has a very small and lightweight head attached where ever you would like to put it, which is connected to the recording unit via a wire. This has two advantages. The wire is a safety line. If your mount breaks you don’t lose the camera in 3 feet of snow. It hangs by the wire and is still with you. The real advantage is that the recording unit, which is the size of a large tv remote, has a screen with controls. The biggest issue with most POV footage you see on the Internet is the camera is pointed too low and the viewer cannot see the horizon to make the footage more pleasing to the eye. With the screen you can watch your first run right away and make adjustments until its perfect. Competitors cameras you have to load the footage onto your computer and then try again the next day.
The only problem anyone will ever see out of VIO footage is overexposure in very bright situations. The footage will be washed out and white. That is old footage. This problem no longer exists. They have released exposure control firmware which allows the user to get the best image no matter what the lighting conditions.
The other complaint people have is why no HD? The VIO is DVD quality footage. You can watch it on your tv and it looks great. SD out of the VIO is a blessing in disguise for 99% of consumers. You will easily be able to edit and play back your footage on your computer with very limited render time. Unless you have a very new computer HD footage takes longer to do anything with. A lot of computers cannot even playback HD footage smoothly. Where is the footage going to end up? The Internet, computer screens, tvs, dvds or the big screen in front of hundreds of people? Unless you answered the big screen in front of hundreds of people the VIO has superb image quality. There’s a reason big action sports film companies like TGR, Standard Films, and Nitro Circus use VIO products and still use them on the big screen.
Here’s some video from last year. Highly compressed via YouTube. The footage looks much better out of the camera. Most of the days were flat light and foggy. The camera handles these very poor lighting conditions very well. The sunny exposure issues you see are completely fixed and no longer an issue via the exposure firmware update that comes with new cameras or is update-able on older units.
Check out our Comparison of GoProHD, ContourHD, & the VIO POV 1.5 cameras
Cheers from Dendrite Studios!
