Hi Guys,

I received the camera today. It was around 9 days delivery from Hong Kong. I guess we are on this side of the Pacific so the delivery time wasn't unusual.

I've only had a short play with it, and it is definitely the cheaper clone of the MD-80. The body is plastic and not alloy, but in some respects that's good because the whole camera weighs 20grams instead of the 39grams for the MD-80. So if you are trying to save every last gram it is a good option. It is a little bigger than the original.

Costing only $20 including delivery I wasn't expecting much of a picture quality and indoors it was slow and poor. But when I took it outside the video quality wasn't bad at all and reasonable frame rate too. I still need to fly it to see how it performs during actual flight. You will need a micro SD card though as it didn't come with one. I just used the one from my MD-80.

With the normal set of 3 mounting clips it also came with a USB cable and a little Mains to USB plug-in charger which was a good deal I thought. I can use the charger to charge the original MD-80 camera too.

It does have the time stamp permanently on the video, but there is no firmware update that I could find to turn it off.

All in all it is a reasonable camera for people starting out with cameras on their rockets.

The packaging is funny though ... in big letters on the front it says, "World's Smallest Voice Recorder" .... hee hee ... because the MD-80 is smaller and claims to be the world's smallest video recorder.

Got a question.
Air command was the camera you received similar to this one here:
http://cgi.ebay.com.au/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=110489717825&ssPageName=STRK:MEWNX:IT
Also do you know what type sensor it has?
Thanks

I got one of those (from the same seller) and was really happy with it. I've got two videos here:
http://www.oflittleinterest.com/content/view/128/39/

It has a date-stamp in the corner, if you put a text file (can't remember what exactly) with the time/date in it, it will update - but only seems to do it for the very next video shot. So I ended up just placing a black bar over that bit. Since my video is turned upside down at ejection (the camera was upside down on the decent), I put bars top and bottom, so it looks even.

I found a great link just the other day that deals with these cheap cameras:
http://chucklohr.com/808/

worth a look.

Krusty

I suspect the two cameras share the same underlying hardware, just the packaging and perhaps battery are different.

That is a great find krusty on the camera info!

Thanks for the replys.
Since you now have yours, is there anyway to remove the camera module and place it outside the rocket while the electronics stay inside. The deconstruction pictures on the site you linked to seemed to indicate it using a ZIF socket, so now I'm unsure if this is possible.
Thanks

Kay guys, I got some great footage today using the keyring cam, I must say for $15, its fantastic.

Sorry I was to lazy to edit the vid, and cut out the boring bits.
http://clanwars.net.au/EMiR/Rockets/Alien/SUNP0001a.avi

AVI Video
52.1Mb

or to skip to boring bits

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEtsiUPKzwo

WOW!

I don't know about the rest of you guys, but for $15 a 30 fps camera, I was impressed withe the quality of the video it produced!

EMiR, was this the type of keyring camera did you use ?



Can you also show us how you mounted the camera to the airframe and how proud it sat on the exterior ?

It looks like a camera that could (with a little modification to the case), sit snuggly with a very low profile on the airframe. Also at that price ($15), you also mount one facing down at the ground for the trip up and another reversed so that it also face the ground on for the trip back down to earth.


Tarp

WOW, I only got to watch it now and as Tarp's said, for $15 that is amazing !!

yerp thats the one Len.

Got mine off Ebay, just got one of the buy now ones, but i'm sure if you want to get in to bidding, prob get it cheaper

http://stores.ebay.com/HuaQiangBei-Shop

I like the look of the sunglasses model, should be easily pulled apart, and mount like little lense out side the rocket and have the elec's inside an AV bay

http://cgi.ebay.com/Mini-DV-DVR-Spy-Sunglasses-Camera-Video-Recorder_W0QQitemZ220556960273QQcmdZViewItemQQptZUK_AudioTVElectronics_Video_Camcorders?hash=item335a382211

Any ways, I have a few friends in the RC Car sence who wish to get these aswell, I will be ordering like 10 or so sortly, if anyone wishes to join in let me know, ether PM or mail: ashley@clanwars.net.au

Excellent video for a $15 camera !

Will definitely get me some of those !

CS

Here is some poor quality footage of a rocket flight from a Thane key-ring camera. When the key ring camera first came on the market, we couldn't get our hands on one quick enough to put in a rocket.
I flew this rocket many times and I can remember having to set the mode of the camera by pushing the buttons with a piece of wire through holes in the air frame, counting the beeps in sequences on the mode and shutter button. I also flew it in a rocket with a J motor but found the battery was compressing the terminal spring it sat on under the g force loading and causing an open circuit. It took a couple of flights to work the problem out so I fitted a spring to the other side of the battery too, bingo, another pathetic photo .
That was in about 2004- 2005, just shows how much cameras have improved.

Steve

My MD80 clone has also arrived, tested it out on my helicopter this morning but the video didn't last long, vibration caused the mounting bracket to fall apart and the camera fell off

Indoor performance is indeed poor but outdoors the frame rate was supposedly pushing towards 25fps at 720x480, it seems to not like very rapid motion (swinging rapidly around or something) but should be fine for RC planes or rockets. I wish there was some indication of the battery charge level via USB like there is for my mp3 player though.

I too wasn't too impressed with the mounting brackets that come with the camera. I am making up my own. The frame rate is relatively good, but the camera will repeat quite a few frames. The true rate is closer to 20fps. The resolution is upsampled from 640 x 480. I am happy with the video quality though.

I've been working on a VirtualDub filter over the last couple of days to try to remove the date time stamp from the video. So far it's looking reasonable.

Did anyone get a copy of the time synchronization file referenced in the "user manual" and if so any chance of sending or posting a link for it?

My clone MD80 arrived yesterday, but I haven't had much "playtime" with it yet, but yeah $20 delivered .......who's complaining!

From Blip.com the cloned versions are way down on frame rate and also they have a lot less storage space.