Oregon Scientific ATC2K Helmet Cam

While riding our tandem I have a video camera mounted on the handlebars. That camera is the Oregon Scientific ATC2K. It is an inexpensive digital video camera that can capture 30 fps at a maximum resolution of 640 x 480 pixels.

The ATC2K is waterproof to 10 feet. I would personally never try to take this camera underwater but it is good to know since sometimes you just get caught in the rain. Having a waterproof camera is a good thing in those situations.

It can connect to your PC using USB 2.0 so transferring your videos from the camera is fairly speedy and robust. A better way to transfer from camera to PC is to use an SD card reader.

The camera uses SD cards for storage and has a maximum capacity of 2 GB. It is not SDHC compatible, so no high capacity SD cards for this unit. With a 2 GB card you can capture about 60 minutes of video and audio.

Audio capture is monaural at about an 8K sampling rate. The problem with the audio is that it tends to be real noisy, wind noise, and it is muted because of the location of the microphone. You would be better served not capturing audio or removing the audio track and replacing it with music.

The ATC2K comes with several mounting options. You can use it as a helmet cam or mount it on your handlebars. The advantage to the helmet mounting is that you are filming where you are looking. The disadvantage is that you are filming where you are looking. So if you are hammering hard, and looking down, all you get is a video of you handlebars or the road right in front of it. We use the handlebar mount. This allows the camera to look forward, or rather where the bike is pointed instead. The key to mounting the camera is to have it pointing just a little to the right side and just a little down from level. This setup puts the sky in the upper third of the image limiting the effect of having the foreground dark with an overly bright sky.

The ATC2K uses standard AA batteries and will work with NiCd or NiMH batteries. The fact that it uses readily available AA’s is a good thing. You can find them anywhere you travel. and they are fairly light and easy to carry if you choose to carry spares.

Some things to keep in mind, At 640 x 480 the picture is just a little bit jumpy. I think this is a result of the codec used to encode the AVI file. Instead of using MPEG they are using Motion JPEG. So to eliminated some of the bounce effect it is better to capture at 320 x 240. Another factor that affects performance is the speed of you SD card. Use a minimum 60x SD card so that it can be written to fast enough to get smooth video.

There is only three buttons and you only need two of them to operate the camera after it is configured. The On/Off button must be held for two seconds, you will hear a beep. The unit will display the current setting on the small LCD screen. There is a big center Play/Stop button, just pressing that button and you will be recording. It is just that simple!

While the output is not spectacular, it is adequate for most action type videos that eventually find their way on to web sites like this or on YouTube.  With USB 2.0 support, Mac and PC compatibility, use of AA batteries and a street price of just around $100.00, it is a great way to get your feet wet in action videos. Download the free Adobe Flash Encoder and you have a good (and cheap) solution for putting those videos on-line.

Additional reviews around the web:

• Helmet Cam Central
• Pixel Perfect Digital
• ReviewsByDon.com