Basejumper.com - archive

Hello.
I noticed a that number of people take video of their jumps in some way. So, I wonder: has anyone tried playing around with one of those CVS "disposable" digital camcorders? I was surprised to find no mention of it here, as it seems that it would work well for recording jumps. Has anyone here experimented with this device?

I had no idea those even existed, and it took me a few minutes with google to find them.

It has some possibilities for sure...

The neat thing about these is that some of them can be made non-disposable (ie, attach it to computer, download video, erase, use again) with a little bit of soldering and the right software (PM me if you want more info on this). So, it makes for a pretty cheap re-usable camera that you can expose to rough conditions.

My understanding is that these things are generally uber-low resolution. This one, for instance, seems to offer a whopping 263x152 pixels (ie, 152 lines). For comparison, NTSC is ~500 lines, and HD (though obviously nobody is expecting HD performance from a disposable camera) is ~1000.

That is indeed the camera I meant. The resolution is not great, especially if you go through CVS for processing. If you pull the recordings off it yourself (see above post) then it is possible to use that software to also tweak the recording settings. I believe you can set it as high as 640x480, the highest resolution that the camera can physically support. I think it also lets you change the maximum recording length, so if you turn up the resolution and turn down the length, the video quality will be pretty good.

Of course, that camera is nothing compared to professional or even amateur equipment. But the fact that it is cheap and relatively rugged (no moving parts) might make it work well as a body cam when jumping.