[1 of 1 customers found this review helpful]

By thisisgonnahurt from Northumberland, UK on 5/8/2008

firstly buy a huge mangifying glass in order to read the tiny screen, make sure you're on 30 frames per sec then set the res to best quality otherwise your footage will be rubbish, VGA - 640/480 is the only realistic option, not great but ok! manual recomends formating the sd card to fat 16 but i didnt bother with any of my 2gig cards & it works great. once you finished with the settings dont touch that button again & ignore anyone who tells you the buttons are hard to press and fiddly - thats exactly how you want them! (no use accidently pressing the menu screen & missing your great faceplant on the landing ramp!) left button is on/off & the big round button in the middle with the pic of a hollywood micky mouse camera- thats your RECORD. well done OS very intuitive, i dont even need to look what i'm doing with the controls because theres realy only one, the RECORD button & its bang in the middle, excellent! ok now the niggles . . i couldnt get premire pro to load the avi file on my xp home for editing & other editing programes just didnt like it. BUT . . vista's movie maker loves it (apart from not having the codec to play audio, downloadable though)i dubbed music over my days kayaking anyway & its came out fine. the auto exposure can be a pain if you're unfamiliar with how it works, basically it will expose for the lightest part of the picture (usually the sky) leaving the rest of the picture (usually the action) under exposed (dark)providing a spot metering function on the camera would correct this but would also make the camera more complex which would spoil the whole package. sooo if you want good footage heres an easy option to get round the exposure prob.:- tilt the camera slightly down when you position it on your bike,kayak,helmet etc. this will make the camera expose correctly & U'll still get all the action. hope this helps anyone make up there mind, I'm happy with mine & i usually winge about everything so there you go . . gotta be good!