I just received a few PMs from people who wondered why I made a disparaging comment about my Sony AS100V POV camera in a recent thread about trying to correct this camera's unusually strong fisheye distortion, especially when recording in the widest angle view, with stabilization disabled.
I thought I should share my experience.
I bought the camera largely because of the review done by Douglass Spotted Eagle, that he posted here:
POV cameras and Sony Vegas
While his review was accurate and competent, it left out a lot of things that I didn't find out until later.
1. The "LiveView" remote provides no way to play back footage in the field.
2. There is no way to delete clips from the camera, even from the "PlayMemories" software. You can do it in PlayMemories, but only if you first transfer ("import") the clip. If you have already imported the clip in a previous session, and then later decide you want to delete the clip from the camera during a later session, you have to re-import it. This is a big time waster and is just plain dumb.
3. The fisheye distortion when not using stabilization is MUCH worse than the GoPro. It is really quite distracting, even when doing POV video.
4. The compression on the 60p 1920x1080 video (the mode I use most often) creates "clumping" artifacts. I've seen this on other cameras, but it is not as bad as this. The details in trees, grass, and other organic objects are quite poor.
5. I just upgraded the camera to firmware version 2.00. However, I so far haven't been able to figure out how to use Live Streaming for anything other than Sony's service.
6. I thought I would like the form factor better than the GoPro, but in fact it really makes it difficult to strap to various parts of your body.
7. Pressing the buttons on the camera when it is in the case is almost impossible. It requires a tremendous amount of force, and I always have to check several times whether it has started.
8. The Liveview remote is impossible to use in sunlight. Since this is mostly an outdoor camera, this renders this part of the product completely useless.
9. Sony has garnered almost no third party support compared to the GoPro. I knew this going in, but thought I'd still be able to get what I need. The best example is the 3-axis gimble for the DJI Phantom (and other UAV/drone products). The Zemus gimble, as one example, does not support any of the Sony action cams.
10. The third party support extends to almost every other sub-market for this product. This is due not only to Sony's lesser marketing of this product to third-parties (similar to SCS's terrible third party support until the last two years), but also to the lack of an interface connector, something the GoPro has which is used to control it from all manner of remote controls, timers, intervalometers, etc.
11. The Wi-Fi range is pathetic. When I worked with the GoPro last spring, I was doing an evaluation for a military application where they wanted to interview people (with the interviewee's knowledge and consent), but wanted the interviewer to be able to simply walk around a village and talk. They wanted to be able to have another person monitor and record the conversation, and direct the interview remotely, not unlike how news people work, but with complete portability. Using various well-known range extending techniques, we were able to get the GoPro to maintain contact at a range of more than the length of a football field. By comparison, my Liveview remote doesn't work at a range of more than eight feet.
12. The PlayMemories software is incompetent, and there are no alternatives. It gives you the ability to edit out a big dead spot in the middle of a clip, but to do this, you have to first select and in/out point of the thing you want to delete. You then save that. However, this creates two independent clips. If you want to save that as one clip, you have to do a separate join operation. IMHO, this is an essential feature. Why? Because the nature of a POV camera is that you turn it on, and leave it on. However, you usually only need to keep about 5% of the footage you shoot. It makes no sense to archive all the footage of someone waiting in the starting gate, ready to ski downhill, or someone paddling out to catch a wave. So, the ability to do lossless editing prior to archiving the footage is, to me, an essential, mandatory feature of the camera package, which includes the camera's software.
The PlayMemories software can't do much else. There is no distortion correction, and no rolling shutter correction.
There are some nice features compared to the GoPro: the AS100V case is much easier to open and close; the low light sensitivity is better; the sound quality is better; and the battery life is better. And -- and this was the main reason I purchased it -- the stabilization is quite good (the GoPro still does not offer internal stabilization). In fact, that is the one thing that has kept me from putting this camera up on eBay.
So, in summary, this is a good camera when you measure some of its specs, and do simple comparisons, as Spot did in his review. However, when you actually want to strap this on to something and get some footage, and then try to manage that footage in post, it leaves much to be desired. And, if you want to interface this camera to something else in order to adapt it to a specific application, it doesn't hold a candle to what you can do with the GoPro.
I thought I should share my experience.
I bought the camera largely because of the review done by Douglass Spotted Eagle, that he posted here:
POV cameras and Sony Vegas
While his review was accurate and competent, it left out a lot of things that I didn't find out until later.
1. The "LiveView" remote provides no way to play back footage in the field.
2. There is no way to delete clips from the camera, even from the "PlayMemories" software. You can do it in PlayMemories, but only if you first transfer ("import") the clip. If you have already imported the clip in a previous session, and then later decide you want to delete the clip from the camera during a later session, you have to re-import it. This is a big time waster and is just plain dumb.
3. The fisheye distortion when not using stabilization is MUCH worse than the GoPro. It is really quite distracting, even when doing POV video.
4. The compression on the 60p 1920x1080 video (the mode I use most often) creates "clumping" artifacts. I've seen this on other cameras, but it is not as bad as this. The details in trees, grass, and other organic objects are quite poor.
5. I just upgraded the camera to firmware version 2.00. However, I so far haven't been able to figure out how to use Live Streaming for anything other than Sony's service.
6. I thought I would like the form factor better than the GoPro, but in fact it really makes it difficult to strap to various parts of your body.
7. Pressing the buttons on the camera when it is in the case is almost impossible. It requires a tremendous amount of force, and I always have to check several times whether it has started.
8. The Liveview remote is impossible to use in sunlight. Since this is mostly an outdoor camera, this renders this part of the product completely useless.
9. Sony has garnered almost no third party support compared to the GoPro. I knew this going in, but thought I'd still be able to get what I need. The best example is the 3-axis gimble for the DJI Phantom (and other UAV/drone products). The Zemus gimble, as one example, does not support any of the Sony action cams.
10. The third party support extends to almost every other sub-market for this product. This is due not only to Sony's lesser marketing of this product to third-parties (similar to SCS's terrible third party support until the last two years), but also to the lack of an interface connector, something the GoPro has which is used to control it from all manner of remote controls, timers, intervalometers, etc.
11. The Wi-Fi range is pathetic. When I worked with the GoPro last spring, I was doing an evaluation for a military application where they wanted to interview people (with the interviewee's knowledge and consent), but wanted the interviewer to be able to simply walk around a village and talk. They wanted to be able to have another person monitor and record the conversation, and direct the interview remotely, not unlike how news people work, but with complete portability. Using various well-known range extending techniques, we were able to get the GoPro to maintain contact at a range of more than the length of a football field. By comparison, my Liveview remote doesn't work at a range of more than eight feet.
12. The PlayMemories software is incompetent, and there are no alternatives. It gives you the ability to edit out a big dead spot in the middle of a clip, but to do this, you have to first select and in/out point of the thing you want to delete. You then save that. However, this creates two independent clips. If you want to save that as one clip, you have to do a separate join operation. IMHO, this is an essential feature. Why? Because the nature of a POV camera is that you turn it on, and leave it on. However, you usually only need to keep about 5% of the footage you shoot. It makes no sense to archive all the footage of someone waiting in the starting gate, ready to ski downhill, or someone paddling out to catch a wave. So, the ability to do lossless editing prior to archiving the footage is, to me, an essential, mandatory feature of the camera package, which includes the camera's software.
The PlayMemories software can't do much else. There is no distortion correction, and no rolling shutter correction.
There are some nice features compared to the GoPro: the AS100V case is much easier to open and close; the low light sensitivity is better; the sound quality is better; and the battery life is better. And -- and this was the main reason I purchased it -- the stabilization is quite good (the GoPro still does not offer internal stabilization). In fact, that is the one thing that has kept me from putting this camera up on eBay.
So, in summary, this is a good camera when you measure some of its specs, and do simple comparisons, as Spot did in his review. However, when you actually want to strap this on to something and get some footage, and then try to manage that footage in post, it leaves much to be desired. And, if you want to interface this camera to something else in order to adapt it to a specific application, it doesn't hold a candle to what you can do with the GoPro.
