SVP Action Camera and Webcam (ActionCamera)

I looked long and hard for a camera with all the features I wanted and this is it. The designer has thought of everything! It is as if someone built himself his dream camera and then made it available to the rest of us.

Things I like:

1. External power option. You can leave this running all day. (Well, about 4 1/2 hours of video at which point your 32GB SD card will be full. But not for lack of power.)

2. Continuous snapshot mode. About 95 high-resolution photos per minute, as long as your power holds out. The setting is 2 pictures per second, which would be 120 a minute, but it doesn’t quite make it, even with a Class 10 SD card.

As for battery life, I’ve recorded 2 hours 44 minutes nonstop video, or 3 hours 6 minutes in continuous snapshot mode. That’s more than 18,000 pictures!

My complaints are VERY minor:

1. The LEDs on the remote flash rather slowly. You have to stare at it a while to confirm what mode the camera is in. This can be dangerous if you are moving — driving, skiing, biking, whatever.

2. Occasionally it just stops recording for no apparent reason. This may be seconds after you start, or several minutes later. So you have to keep an eye on the remote status light to be sure it is still recording.

3. Once it locked up and became non-responsive, either to the remote or the control buttons. It was stuck with a green light on which usually means taking snapshots. I had been recording video when it locked. I had to unclip it from my helmet, open it up, and remove the battery to force it to reboot. Fortunately this “hard shut-down” did not corrupt my flash card.

4. There is a clip included that you can thread through a strap or something to hold the camera. The plastic is so thin that it broke in a few weeks. I couldn’t find a replacement on the Ghost web site.

5. It advertises 170 degrees field of view, but that must be a diagonal measure like TVs and monitors, because I get only a little over 90 degrees, maybe 110 or so.

I tried this out on a long day ride thru the smokies. The camera did very well with lighting changes as I rode towards the setting sun. It picks up tons of wind noise, so I need to fiddle with the settings to somehow arrange a mic to pick up either me or the engine noise, and not the really loud wind noise. The helmet mount did not last one day. The sticker glue seems to be the culprit. The rotating mounting bracket also comes loose and needs to be adjusted every 30-45 minutes of active riding. The rotating mount just does not stay tight enough to hold it’s mount position.

The camera itself is pretty good in terms of video quality. The button for starting/stopping filming is not very sensitive, so it seems like I almost always turn it off and on a few times instead of just starting or stopping the video, since it uses the same button. Suggest: add a dedicated slider switch for off/on and not use a button at all for Off/On.

The rear hatch is a pain to to open.

The device supports a Mini USB Cable USB 2.0 Type A to Mini B Cable Male Cord. So all the rest of your more modern devices that nearly all use microUSB? You will now have to ALWAYS remember to carry that one MiniUSB cable along to support your Drift Device. This bit is inexcusably lazy on the part of Drift’s product designers. How hard could it be fora team who can design a rugged camera such as this to include a modern MicroUSB port?

Updated: After a very long road trip from Georgia USA to Northwest Territory Canada, the camera eventually died on me. I am attempting to get Drift to replace it, but they are hesitant, since when I bought this, the camera was no longer in production. Not sure how that is a defense against upholding a warranty?

Here is my email to Drift Support, they have not yet denied the request, but they also have not yet taken ownership of the problem, requesting I provide a Proof of Purchase.

Body: I purchased a HD Ghost late June 2017. I took it on a trip to the Canadian Arctic from Atlanta GA via New Mexico, on a 2010 BMW R1200GS Adventure motorcyle. The device died about 3 weeks into the trip. I lost track of the item after I returned home, and just found it again organizing some gear for this summer’s next trip. I had intended to request a return/replacement, but since it was misplaced, I had no grounds to make the request.

Before it died, I endured lots of very strange functional problems.

Mounting on the front fender made video unwatchable owing to vibration. Understandable. I related the device to the side of the bike, outside the wind screen. Not an optimal vantage filming perspective, being on one side of the bike and lower to the ground, but at least the footage was not vibrating.

I kept the device plugged into power via a USB cable. This USB connection usually only powered the camera and my cellphone (streaming music to bluetooth). Occasionally, I would also recharge a tablet or earbuds in the tank bag. The number of devices did not have any apparent effect on the resulting problems I experienced with the Drift camera.

1- Remote Device disconnection issues
Each time I turned off the bike, the Drift Remote would have to be re-paired to the the Drift Camera. This became a true nuisance. The camera, since it has an internal rechargeable battery, should not have been affected by the status of the power supply from the bike, yet, each cycling of the bike’s power, turning the bike on and off, would cause the remote to disconnect. My riding buddies got a little tite of the dance. Since the device has to be mounted on the right side of the bike, and I dismount on the left, I was constantly doing a Chinese Fire Drill to trouble shoot the remote connection, which often did not easily reconnect without multiple attempts.

[Using the rear mount was even more problematic, since I needed to remove the device whenever I went indoors, and since the leash only connects to the rear panel, I had to take a lot of time to remove it that way. I ended up settling on the right hand mount so I could just take the leash off the bike mount without ever taking it out of the rear panel.]

2-The Drift battery failed about a week into the trip. Luckily I had purchased 2 Wasabi Power 3.7v 1900mAh 7.0Wh Drift GBAT replacement batteries, compatible with Drift HD Ghost. One of these died a couple of weeks later. The 2nd battery didn’t last more than a couple of days, but then, I am not sure it was the battery. I was able to use the device without the battery at all by connecting to USB power, which I was forced to try after the 3rd battery failed. Eventually, the power from the USB would also not work.

Essentially, the device is now completely dead. I would like a replacement for the device.