StephenDedalus

5 years ago I was hit by a car. I barely recouped my expenses and I was off my bike for years, my health severely compromised. I'm biking again and someone almost hit me last night. I feel like I should get a GoPro so I can at least get a license plate the next time this happens. Is there any consensus on the "best" camera to get for this kind of use? Constant recording while riding, mounting on the bike, etc.

deanp

Garmin VIRB........

droy45

Almost hit again? Wow, that is very unfortunate. What is going on? Find safer areas to ride. I constantly strive to stay out of major traffic. There is just too few of us riding bikes in this country and we catch people by surprise all the time. They just do not expect anyone to be riding a bike with cars and that's how these accidents happen. Just like there is more motorcycle accidents today than at any other time in history. More cars means more incidents. And there are more cars on the road today than ever. The GoPro is very popular so I think it would be a good choice.

cccorlew

I'd love to read about people with goPro cameras. Facing front or back, or buy two? And, as teh OP asks, which one(s)? Erase the card every day if nothing happens? How about battery life? Are there existing threads about this?

ItsJustMe

RD32II from eBay. Seriously. I have owned a GoPro Hero3 White, a Contour Roam, a Sony Action Cam and a few others. I sold the GoPro after trying an RD32II. It's lighter and the mount looks less ridiculous, and the image quality is a touch better, enough to make a difference when reading license plates.

Bonus, they're $125 shipped. I have two on my helmet, front and rear facing. They're quite light, lighter than the gopro, so it's not bad having them on the helmet.

Battery life is about 2 hours. I plug in once a day and erase the files as well while I'm at it. Generally I just plop the helmet on my desk and plug in one camera. When the charge light goes out, I turn it on, erase the files from the PC, disconnect and repeat with the other cam. Charging takes about 2.5 hours.

Downsides versus some other cameras: no screen so you can't really change modes without plugging it in to a monitor. Battery is fixed, so you can't swap in another for more runtime.

NOTE the RD32 is NOT THE SAME CAMERA as the RD32II - the RD32 is an old standard def cam. The RD32II is newer and high def.

StephenDedalus

So I went looking for the RD32II on Amazon.com and found this.

https://www.amazon.com/Hands-Free-Act...&keywords=RD32

$70? Is that correct? A little googling says that there are knock-offs and I'm tempted to buy that except for the possibility that it's a knock-off.

ItsJustMe

It's either a knockoff or an RD32, which is a totally different camera than the RD32II.

on eBay typing RD32II actually works correctly and gets you a page full at $125 shipped (some lesser prices but with higher shipping). I'd recommend a Hong Kong vendor rather than Chinese - China post is notoriously slow, 3 to 6 weeks shipping for me recently (it's gotten worse lately). Hong Kong post typically gets me stuff in 4 to 8 days.

Redleaf has some US stock but I'm not willing to pay an extra $40 to get it a few days sooner, since it all came from the same place anyway.

spectastic

I have a gopro 2. It's cheaper than the 3. The sounds is worse, but I'm not real interested in the sound. The video quality is comparable to the 3, as far as I know. It's just the color shades are different between the 2 and 3, also the 3 is better underwater (if you do surfing or diving or anythign like that)

Now I'm curious about the RD32II