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(More customer reviews)I've had a chance to play around with the new Drift HD170 Stealth camera for a few weeks now and made a quick video just to show a few things I've tried with it. What makes it "stealth," I guess, is the new sleek black design (the casing of the unit is made from a durable black rubberized plastic). The bright orange face of the older model did likely call some attention to itself, and for some uses (i.e. stealth uses) that's a drawback. While the older model's bright colored face made it look fun, I think I do prefer the solid black and can see why they opted for it. The feature that makes this camera really stand out from other similar POV or "extreme sports" cameras, though, is the onboard LCD screen, that allows you to see what you are going to be capturing on the spot, so you can arrange the camera just as you like; it also allows you to go through the menu on the spot and adjust options depending on your needs at the moment. (You can set things up in the menu so that the LCD turns off after a minute of being unused - so as to prolong the life of the battery).
What's struck me is that the real value of this camcorder is its combination of a rugged and durable design with its versatility. It's emphasized for use with extreme sports - but it's useful pretty much anywhere you wouldn't risk another more fragile camera. It's water and weather resistant - not water proof - so you could use it in light rain, maybe even during a hurricane if it was securely mounted, but certainly in extreme conditions where you'd be worried about a standard camcorder. (I've heard that Drift Innovation - the company that makes these - will be coming out with a fully waterproof case for the Stealth some time soon - so that you can add cliff diving and snorkeling to the list of extreme sports you can capture subjectively with the Stealth) The camera comes with three different mounts - one that you can secure to any kind of narrow belt (and it comes with an elastic belt), one that you can put on a handlebar, and one that you can secure to a helmet with the included velcro adhesives. It's easy to orient the camera, even if you've got it mounted in an odd spot - the shooting orientation can be changed simply by rotating the lens manually, and the quick release mount can also be rotated so that the unit can be oriented however you like with respect to the mount.
I'm not much of an extreme sports guy - but I can see where this would come in handy for various types of video projects other than extreme sports, and I tried to illustrate a few possible uses in the video. You can mount it on a bike, a motorcycle, a skateboard, or on a 12-foot-long paint pole elevated over a car (as I did in the attached video, using the handlebar mount attached to the end of the pole). Obviously, I wouldn't want to put my Canon VIXIA HFS10 on top of a long pole like that because if it dropped or bumped into something it would almost certainly be damaged. While the Stealth is not damage proof it's a lot more rugged than a standard camera, and so it works great in lots of precarious situations. I used to think that when I needed an extreme shot the best option would be a relatively inexpensive camera like my Flip, that I could more afford to have damaged than my nicer camera - but with this one the risk of serious damage is significantly diminished.
You can shoot decent photos (5 megapixels - and they look fine, but as you'd expect on a device that's tailored for video capture they don't really compare to the images you'd capture on a compact camera in this price range - expect a few notches up from the quality you'd capture on a phone and you won't be disappointed), and very cool time lapse sequences (with shooting intervals from 3 to 30 seconds apart), plus it takes surprisingly good HD video for such a small camera. It's not as nice or as versatile as my Canon, but the video is at least as good or better than what I can capture on my Flip Mino HD - plus it's got a much wider lens, which is ideal for "point of view" shooting. At 720p it captures a 170 degree view, and it's got a bit of a fisheye effect - which is kind of nice, it looks very cool with POV sports footage but could be effective in other applications as well. At 1080p it captures a slightly narrower range of 120 degrees, and there's less distortion, but not as many options for frame rates. At 720p you can shoot at frame rates from 25fps to 60, and shooting at 60fps allows you to slow the footage down in an editing program without things looking jerky as they would if you'd shot at a standard 30fps and then played back at an effective 15 frames per second. At 1080p you can shoot either 25 or 30fps. (You can also shoot standard definition video if you like). The video is encoded with H.264 in a Quicktime (.mov) wrapper - so it's easy to import and play or edit in a variety of applications.
One other nice feature is that the set comes with a remote control "watch" - you can wear it on your wrist (it's got a velcro band) and it has two buttons: for record and stop. There's a bit of a time lag on the stop function - it takes a couple seconds and sometimes I've found I've had to press the button twice to get it to respond, but otherwise it works quite well. The weak element on the camera is the onboard mike - it doesn't capture clear sound at all. It's noisy and would really only work as reference and not playback. In other words if you spoke into the mike or near the mike you would be able to hear what you'd said - assuming you weren't on a motorcycle, or free falling from high altitudes - and it might help you to remember something - but you wouldn't want to even consider including the audio in a completed video. The main reason for the weakness of the mike seems to be that its input is protected by a rubber seal - in order to ensure the water resistance of the unit. The real value of this camera is in capturing video you wouldn't be able (or willing) to capture in other ways. There is another option with this camera that not all cameras of this type allow, which is to plug in an external microphone - but I'm pretty sure the input is proprietary, which means you either have to buy the mike from Drift or you have to buy one of the input cables for your mike from them. When you do use an external mike you have to keep the rear hatch of the camera open - and Drift sells a kind of silicon boot to help keep things sealed and protected when the mike is connected and the door is open.
The Stealth is not a one-size-fits-all camcorder that will meet every need and wouldn't by any stretch replace a standard camcorder for ordinary shooting, especially given its fixed, extremely wide lens and its substandard onboard mike - but it can capture images you'd never dream of trying to capture with your standard camcorder. If all you want to do is capture extreme sports from the point of view of the athlete, or other extreme images that would put an ordinary camera at risk, this would be a very good option. For someone like me, who only rarely has a need for "extreme sports footage," I know I won't use this all the time, but I'm very happy to have it in my "bag of tricks" because, as I think my little video shows, it's a very versatile camera that can capture some very cool and fairly good quality images and video that could fit nicely into a wide range of different kinds of video projects.
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Drift Innovation HD170 Stealth Action Camera with HD Recording, 4x Digital Zoom and 1.5-Inch LCD Screen (Black)
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