Chilli Technology Action 3 Mini Review

Overview

The product is aimed at action sports which can be mounted on a bike or helmet but there are other attachments that come with it.

Box Contents

The specification of the camera is not great but it’s a budget camera so it’s no Go Pro which are used on shows such as Top Gear. The case is metal and state to be waterproof. There are rubber rings around the 2 screw points. One at the back to access the micro SD card slot, micro USB for charging and accessing the SD card, reset button and one at the front which holds the plastic cover over the camera. The casing feels tough and durable but I’m not sure about the plastic lens cover.

The box contained a lot of accessories such as a (non adjustable) bar mount, Velcro and Velcro straps and belts. The bar mount is made of 100% plastic including the locking screws. There are rubber inserts inside the bar holder but the rubber is not very well formed and can easily fall out if poked.

The Velcro straps and holder are better and include generous amounts. There are pieces which have adhesive on but I’m not sure of the quality.

Use

I’m sure the unit was suppose to come with a manual but mine did not. Just to some up in case others have had the same:
LED (in use)

1. Solid Red, No Green – Displayed when turning the unit on with a press of the button. The unit is warming up / initialising
2. Solid Red, Solid Green – The unit is powered up and ready to record
3. Solid Red, Flashing Green – Unit is recording

The recording process would be:

1. Press the button
• Solid red light appears
2. Wait for solid green light
3. Press the button to start recording
• Green light starts to flash
4. Do recording
5. Press button to stop recording
• Green light turns solid
6. Press and hold the button to turn the camera off
• Both lights turn off

The battery is rated 3.5 hours and I have managed to test it for a non-continuous 2.5-3hours without any problems.

Date Time Stamp

By default the date time stamp should be shown on all recorded videos. To make changes to this perform the following:

1. Plug in the USB cable to a computer or insert the micro SD card
2. Navigate to the root of the SD card i.e not inside any of the folders
3. Create a text file called time.txt
4. Edit the text file and enter the following YEAR.MONTH.DATE HOUR.MINUTE.SECOND N 50

Replace YEAR.MONTH.DATE HOUR.MINUTE.SECOND Y 50 with actual date. The Y is a flag to tell the camera to show or hide the date time stamp i.e N or Y. Leave the 50 (not sure what that is for). Example text that should be in the time.txt file:

2011.11.28 13.45.00 N 50

The above code will set the date as 28/11/2011 with a time of 1:45pm and do not show date time stamp.

Example Recording

The transfer rate using the device and supplied USB cable was extremely slow! It was averaging around 715kb/s on a 4GB non rated micro SD card. Also it seems to split the recordings into 30 minute 16 second per file.

Ok it doesn’t show the sound quality but it’s an idea on how well the video function performs.

Summary

For the price the camera makes a good throw away camera. It comes with cheap mounts but enough to get someone started. At under £25 + £10+ for the memory card I won’t cry if it breaks.

Chilli Technology Action 3 VGA Head Cam – Black

About Danny

I.T software professional always studying and applying the knowledge gained and one way of doing this is to blog. Danny also has participates in a part time project called Energy@Home [http://code.google.com/p/energyathome/] for monitoring energy usage on a premise. Dedicated to I.T since studying pure Information Technology since the age of 16, Danny Tsang working in the field that he has aimed for since leaving school. View all posts by Danny → This entry was posted in Review and tagged camera, Chilli Technology, Chilli Technology Action 3, Micro SD, USB, YouTube. Bookmark the permalink.

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