cameras

what camera for FPV?

  • GoPro

    Votes: 1 20.0%
  • board cam

    Votes: 3 60.0%
  • other (please elaborate below!)

    Votes: 1 20.0%

  • Total voters
    5

zev

lumpy member
now, this is a rather big and obvious question to ask about fpv, but what camera to use?

on teh interwebz I have found a lot of conflicting information. some people swear by using a gopro recording and broadcasting at the same time, some folks record with the gopro, but broadcast with a standard def board camera, like the sony 600TVL. others use a camera like that for recording and broadcasting.


what is the best thing to do? separate cameras a board camera for FPV and a gopro for recording? or something that is halfway in between those two, like the foxtech fpv cam v3?

please help out a young nooblet.
 

zev

lumpy member
do you record with that as well? or do you have another camera for recording your flights?
 

Carbon

Elemental Madness
I find that there are 4 main advantages to having a separate camera
1) GoPro was never meant to send out non-HD video. You get a better picture from the Sony camera, especially when it comes to looking into the sun, less washout.
2) You can manually set the brightness on the CCD camera
3) GoPro battery can go dead mid-flight and you loose video
4) finally, If you don't want to fly with the extra weight of the GoPro you can just remove it
 

zev

lumpy member
thanks! I think I will be going with something like the 600 if not it exactly.

one last question, can you record with those board cameras?
 

lonewolf7717

Senior Member
I find that there are 4 main advantages to having a separate camera
1) GoPro was never meant to send out non-HD video. You get a better picture from the Sony camera, especially when it comes to looking into the sun, less washout.
2) You can manually set the brightness on the CCD camera
3) GoPro battery can go dead mid-flight and you loose video
4) finally, If you don't want to fly with the extra weight of the GoPro you can just remove it

Agree 100% with all four of Carbon's points and would like to add three more

5) Lens on gopro for me personally made fpv very difficult....hard to gauge distance with such a wide field of view and fisheye
6) Gopro latency especially on the orginal hero and hero2 not sure if its as much an issue with new models......too much lag time in video transmission made low level fast fpv down right dangerous....I personally couldn't stand it.
7) Carbon mentioned "washout".....there is also the gopros very poor low light capability.....sunset fpv with fading light was just out of the question for me.....could hardly see a thing

btw my 540tv far outperforms my gopro in image quality and low light conditions (great long after the sun has set) and a fair bit cheaper than 600tvl.

the new V3 Horyzon interests me greatly....good non-latent video feed for fpv.....hd record quality that really is beginning to compete with perhaps Hero2 although not the newer gopros and the ability to control when to record via Tx without fpv feed interruption. Downside for me is although V3 Horyzon has far less interference than the V2 in the 400mhz range it still puts off some noise and I am looking to switch to 433mhz here soon.
 

lonewolf7717

Senior Member
thanks! I think I will be going with something like the 600 if not it exactly.

one last question, can you record with those board cameras?
you can record the video transmission at your ground station with a video splitter, but not really any way to record on the plane before transmission. Lots of guys use older camcorders that have a video/in record function....such camcorders/mini-cams can sometimes be found on ebay. Or you can use a mini-dvr such as this one http://www.readymaderc.com/store/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=11_14&products_id=1204
 

lonewolf7717

Senior Member
by the way there are other dvr options out there a bit cheaper....keep in mind your video quality will not be as good due to compression process but i do like to record all my flights since i have an osd with gps coordinates so that if the plane ever goes down far away i can replay dvr to last few seconds to get general location based on gps.
 

bmsweb

Site Moderator
For FPV flying I love my Security Camera 2000. If you watch the video below and jump straight to about the 3:30 mark you will see how good the vision is in my FPV Goggles. This was the best upgrade I've done to my aircraft to date:

The DVR I used in the above video is a SanDisk V-Mate. Not made any more but you can still pick them up from ebay from time to time. I have 2 of them now.

If you're aircraft is big enough having a separate FPV camera is the way to go.

My son the other day flew with his new HoryzonHD V3 and loved it. Unfortunately I'm yet to fly his aircraft so I have no idea just how good it is. I really like this option for smaller aircraft.