Again, much of this will be very similar to what you do with a GoPro, but in fairness the GoPro is better camera with more features. Still, this is not a bad camera, and it does the four modes you might expect. It can do video still photos, burst mode, and time lapse. You select the mode using the Mode button on front, which also doubles as the power button. Push and hold to turn it on or off, then push to cycle through the modes.

Video

This is the primary use case for an action cam, so how does the video work? When you select video, you can just start shooting by pressing the button on top of the camera, next to the red “power on” light. This button is called the Shutter/Select Button because it does these two functions.

When you have turned it on and selected video you can make some choices. This is where the touch screen is used. The screen on the back will show a wrench icon which is for settings, tap it and you can set the video resolution:

• 4K, 25FPS
• 2.7K, 30FPS
• 1080P, 60FPS
• 720P, 120FPS
• 720P, 60FPS

You move up and down the list of resolutions using up and down arrow buttons on the side of the camera. In this case I have chosen what I think is a reasonable default for an amateur. Note that all of these resolutions have a 16:9 aspect ratio. The 720P, 120FPS would be a good choice if you wanted to do some slow motion video. This camera also has Image Stabilization, which you can turn on underneath the Video Resolution option. Just touch the screen and select “On”.

Note: The Touch Screen is not accessible while the camera is in the waterproof case, so you should make your settings in advance if you plan to shoot underwater.

I chose to shoot my videos at 1080p, 60fps as shown in the picture above, and this worked out fairly well for me. One thing I found, and I don’t know how common this is with action cams, is that the videos will not be longer than 3 minutes. If you keep shooting, the camera just starts another video file, and so on. For posting videos to social media platforms, this does seem to make some sense. File sizes can vary a little depending on the content, but with these settings my 3 minute videos were pretty consistently in the 450-475 MB range. So assuming a conservative 475 MB per video, my 64 GB SD card would hold around 134 three-minute videos, or over 6 hours of video. And since many of my videos were less than 3 minutes long, I was never in the least danger of running out of storage on our trip.

Photos

To switch to Photo mode, press the Mode button on front of the camera. When it says Photo you are there. Again, pressing the Wrench icon can get you into the settings, but it is completely non-intuitive. I finally figured it out. You need to press the Down button to Angle, tap that once, hit the Back button on the touch screen, and now the Down button will get you into some options that were not there before:

• Diving Mode
• Loop recording
• Time Lapse Video
• Date Stamp
• Exposure
• Photo Resolution
• Burst Photo
• Time Lapse Photo
• Continuous Lapse

Select Photo Resolution, and you get:

• 16MP
• 14MP
• 12MP
• 8MP
• 5MP
• 4MP

I did a little testing and found that these produce the following file sizes:

• 16MP 2590K
• 14MP 2364K
• 12MP 2023K
• 8MP 1294K
• 5MP 906K
• 4MP 759K

Since this was done using a 64GB MicroSD card, I can estimate the number of photos I can store on this card (because of rounding and powers-of-two magnitudes this is approximate):

• 16MP 2590K 24710 photos
• 14MP 2364K 27072 photos
• 12MP 2023K 31636 photos
• 8MP 1294K 49459 photos
• 5MP 906K 70640 photos
• 4MP 759K 84321 photos

Given these numbers, I shot our photos at the highest possible resolution. Although I did take along extra SD cards, I never needed to use them.

Deleting

You can delete photos or videos pretty easily. On the bottom left of the touch screen is a button that looks like it is a play button (a right-pointing arrow in a square, as shown above) . But if you press this you get a screen where you can select either videos or photos. They will display on the screen one at a time, and you can hit the Trash can icon to delete them.

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