- So, (gasps).
That was not good.
I was trying to do a cool little intro,
where I twirl it around, and then land it,
and then start talking,
did not work at all.
Are you okay microphone?
So this is not a GoPro.
It kind of looks like a GoPro.
Even the packaging, look at it,
it's a knockoff of a GoPro.
But this one kind of caught my attention,
just 'cause it's $119,
and I still can't figure out how to open up this packaging,
just like the GoPro.
So here it is,
it's called the AKASO, I think?
V50 Pro?
Not sure if I'm pronouncing that right,
but here it is.
Now the GoPro HERO8 is, I think, $350 now?
It used to be $399,
now I saw it on their website for $350,
this is $120, so what is that?
About a third of the price of the GoPro.
I'm gonna set up this overhead camera,
man I should've done this earlier.
Is this camera blocking my face a little bit?
Hold on.
Let's load in this battery,
we have a quarter inch there,
which is actually kind of convenient,
the GoPro's don't have that.
All this just looks super exposed,
so I wouldn't really trust this in outdoor weather
without putting it in the underwater housing, like that.
The build quality?
Not that impressive,
but again, we're dealing with $119.
Now there's quite a few things in the box.
Bunch of these little mounting solution knick-knacks,
and a handlebar clamp,
a plate with a quarter inch,
so you can slap that onto a tripod.
One of these watches come with it,
so you can hit record from your watch.
This came with one of the earlier version of the GoPro.
Never used it once,
but might as well test it out.
And what is in here?
What are these for?
No idea.
All right, comes with a bunch of stuff.
Now the mount that's on here seems to be the same
as the one on the GoPro,
so that's useful
if you already have a bunch of GoPro accessories.
You can probably mount this the same spot. (grunts)
So this tool could actually be kind of nice in these cases,
it gives you a little bit of extra leverage.
That was on there tight.
Comes with a little dual slot charger,
and an extra battery.
So out of the box you get two batteries,
which is a little bonus there.
So I'm gonna throw this on the charger real quick,
and let's go look at the GoPro.
All right, so this is a list of all my favorite things
that the GoPro HERO8 does really well.
But let's just start right here at the top
which is the GoPro look.
GoPro has kind of this unique look to it,
and it doesn't look good
in all kinds of lighting conditions,
but when it's a nice sunny day,
with nice blue skies,
it looks beautiful,
it's very vibrant and very poppy,
so let's start off by testing that.
Now first impressions,
the image quality kind of reminds me of a GoPro
a couple generations back.
It's not amazing,
but for $119, it's acceptable.
Putting it side by side with the GoPro,
the GoPro just seems to be more natural.
Colors are richer,
there's more detail,
it's just a better image.
What's killing me right now though,
is that time stamp in the top left corner.
Ew.
How the (bleep) do I turn that off?
That is nasty.
There you are.
See that date stamp?
Off, please.
Gross.
I mean, that's why we have metadata,
you don't have to bake that into the video clip.
Another thing is also the touchscreen
doesn't feel as fluid as a GoPro.
Like I'm constantly trying to swipe,
but then it thinks I'm pressing a button,
and if I press a button,
sometimes it thinks I'm swiping.
It's not that fluid,
but it works.
Okay, this is weird, okay?
It's a red button and a blue one.
One of them's to change modes,
one of them's to hit record.
Which one do you think's the record button?
The red one, right?
That's what you would think.
But the red one toggles the settings,
it goes between photo and video.
You press the blue one,
and then it'll start recording.
Don't you guys know that red usually means record?
That's odd, not a deal breaker.
And the screen isn't bad,
but one of the things I have noticed,
it's branch new,
I literally just took the sticker off,
you saw me do it.
If I go out into the sun like this,
look at that though,
it looks all scratched and stuff.
See that?
Nice and clean, that all looks scratched already,
even though I just took off the sticker,
so build quality, there's definitely a difference.
Now the scratches aren't as distracting
when the displays are on.
The display sizes?
I wanna say it's pretty similar to the GoPro size.
The GoPro itself, the body, a little bit bigger.
Not by much, but just a little bit,
and a little bit more weight to it as well.
Now another thing that's killing me
is the audio out of this thing,
so I'm gonna switch to the microphone on here,
in three, two, one.
And now you are listening to audio from here.
So if I talk kind of quietly,
it's not so bad,
but as I start to talk louder, it sounds terrible.
And if it's really loud then, my God, turn it off.
Now the image stabilization on the GoPro
is really really good,
and on the AKASO, it's not terrible,
as long as you're moving fairly smooth.
It's good enough to the point where I would watch it,
if it had no stabilization,
I'd be like, "I gotta turn this off."
But I also tried running
with the two cameras next to each other,
and that's where the stabilization differences really show.
Now one thing that this is definitely gonna lack
is the horsepower.
So once we wanna get any slow motion,
let's say 60 frames per second,
this has to drop down to full HD,
which the GoPro can still do it in 4K.
How much does that really matter?
Let's take a look.
Definitely a huge difference,
the full HD on this camera, not that impressive.
If I punch into a fuse box on this shot,
then you just see there's so much more detail on the GoPro.
In the fence, on the ground, on Sam's face, everything.
I'm gonna go off topic for a second,
how's this lighting looking?
Is it a little bit too toppy?
It's accentuating my eye bags a little bit, isn't it?
This is what I'm using right here.
It's a Westcott Flex Light,
it's pretty low profile,
so even though I don't have that much space here,
I can still tuck this in this corner.
And of course I love that it's full RGB,
so I can toggle between a bunch of different funky colors,
but anyways, stay focused here.
It's horizontal right now, when I see this, vertical.
So now see how it's vertical?
I'm hoping that this little area
will help kind of fill in my eye bags,
let's see if it works.
There you go, what do you guys think?
Is that a little bit better?
I'm hoping that it actually did make a difference,
'cause that would've been a big waste of time.
120 frames per second is when the GoPro
does have to dip down to a lower resolution,
but only 2.7K,
2.7K still looks pretty good on the GoPro.
The AKASO has to drop down to 720P,
it looks really really bad.
I would just not even use it.
This is capped at 120 frames per second,
the GoPro can keep going at 240 frames per second,
so really slow mo,
and still maintain a pretty decent image quality.
So clear winner is GoPro for slow mo.
Now one of the biggest advantages that the GoPro has
is that it's a GoPro.
They have the longest track record
of making action cameras,
and making them really solid.
It's rugged, durable, comes with a one year warranty.
I wasn't able to find much warranty information on this,
but I did see on the website that if you register it,
you get a year extension on the warranty,
so I'm assuming if you register it,
you get a year warranty.
I think, I'm not sure.
I couldn't find it.
But because they've been around for so long,
there's so many accessories out there for it already.
They're supposed to be coming out with a medium mod,
so you can flip that display,
so you could have a little selfie screen,
and a little external microphone.
I personally bought this specifically
for my motorcycle helmet.
So I have this little accessory on here,
so this will record my microphones,
and it actually records a stereo channel,
so two microphone that get recorded separately
come out of here, I just plug it in, and it gets the sound.
Battery life seems to be pretty decent though,
I've been recording in 4K for over an hour now,
and there is no 30 minute record limit,
so that's nice.
The battery looks like it's almost dead,
but here's how long the clip actually lasted
before it ended up cutting itself.
But yeah, it's a pretty decent battery life.
I wonder how good the footage will come out
if I were to use this as my helmet cam for the day.
I mean, I can't plug in my accessory microphone
into here or anything,
but let's see how it does.
All right, so check it out, I got this stupid thing on here.
Now it does work,
if I hit the record button from here,
the camera starts recording,
and I can hit it again to cut it.
But I think the idea of wearing this watch
is so that you can press this
when the camera is not as easily accessible,
but the thing is, the range on this thing isn't that good,
so you need to be close to the camera anyways.
But here's a design flaw, okay?
Here's the sound this camera makes when you start recording.
Hear that?
Now here's the sound it makes when you cut recording.
It's the same exact sound.
So the issue is, if you have it on your head,
or on your chest,
or somewhere where it's not clearly visible,
you go to hit record,
and you hear that sound,
and it's like, "Okay, did you start recording
"or did you just cut?"
And there's no indicators on the front of the camera,
so if you have it mounted like this,
every time I hit it,
I have to actually turn it, look at it,
"Okay, it's recording."
and turn it back into place.
The GoPro has that little indicator up here on the front,
as well as a little light,
so you can generally tell when it's recording,
but a lot of times I mount this camera somewhere
where I can't see it, like on top of my helmet or something,
and I usually use the beeping sound
to know if I just cut or if I'm starting to record.
But yeah, the only thing it would need to change
is have it make a different sound when you cut the camera
than when you start recording.
Anyways, let's go for a spin.
(music)
All right, so quick interruption,
this footage, pretty shaky.
Turns out the stabilization got turned off on here.
Now by default,
image stabilization is turned off on this camera.
Which is a little bit weird to me,
I think by default, they should just have it on,
but this is my second time, just today,
where the image stabilization turned off,
and I was recording 4K 30,
and I shot it assuming that the image is stabilized,
until I look at the footage,
it's like, "Why is it so shaky?"
So, this footage, shaky.
But let's go ahead and come back to it.
That's a nice little ride through Mulholland Drive,
which is one of my favorite roads to ride through,
but I'm trying to vlog on this camera.
How's the picture quality?
How's the sound quality?
You tell me.
Sound quality's probably pretty terrible, isn't it?
The picture quality?
I'm not hating it, okay, I don't love it.
For the price,
the picture quality of this camera isn't the worst.
So there's that,
but the audio quality,
when it's bad audio, it always bugs me.
And you hear that high pitched really annoying sound.
Especially when I talk like this,
it just sounds really bad.
All right, let's get back and use a real microphone.
Look what setting I've found deep in the menu.
That looks like the microphone levels,
let me try dropping that down 'til let's say 50%?
Let's see if that makes the audio more tolerable,
so here's the audio now from the AKASO microphone,
and it's at 50% mic input level.
So how's it sound now?
Is it still doing that really annoying loud popping sound?
What if I get a little bit closer?
What if I yell?
I don't know,
hopefully with a lower input it's doing better.
It's cool that you can adjust the mic input level,
there's just no place for me to monitor the levels,
so I don't know if 50%'s at a good spot or no.
It does have a quick start option,
so let's time this out, ready?
And...
It's booting up and it should start recording automatically.
How long did that take?
That's how long it took to boot up and record.
That's not bad.
That's pretty good actually.
Now one of my favorite things about the GoPro,
is that they have one of the widest angles
I've seen in an action camera.
So the SuperView mode,
look how wide it is
compared to the widest angle on the AKASO.
It's much wider in width,
but especially in height.
'Cause basically SuperView takes a four by three image,
and kind of compresses it down,
so it's recording a taller sensor,
and kind of squeezes everything into here,
so you essentially end up with a super wide frame,
which I love.
Especially if I'm doing POV,
I can mount it on my forehead or on my helmet,
and I know it's filming the widest angle
I can get out of an action camera.
So SuperView?
I love that.
The AKASO's still pretty wide,
I'm holding them both out at arm's length right now,
and it's wide enough I would say,
but I like having the option of going wider to SuperView.
It's also worth noting that this does have an app.
I wouldn't call it the greatest app ever developed,
but hey, look, see it works as a wireless monitor,
so there you go.
It has a little bit of latency,
and sometimes it gets a little bit choppy,
but it's still pretty nice having this option
to wirelessly connect to it with your phone.
You can also go in and adjust your basic settings there,
but it's also worth noting
that when you're using your phone app,
you can no longer use the buttons
on the cameras or use the display
when it's connected to this app.
And then there's the GoPro app,
which is just better,
it connects to the camera faster,
it's just a better image connection,
and there's less latency,
and less choppiness,
it's very responsive.
So they both have an app, which is cool,
but the GoPro app?
Definitely better.
Now when it comes to low light,
neither of these cameras are great in low light,
but the GoPro 8 still has the advantage,
it's still cleaner.
You get a lot less of that motion blur,
and a lot more detail retained in the image,
so points for GoPro.
We do have a time-lapse feature into there
which is cool, but it's again,
not as cool as the TimeWarp feature that's in the GoPro.
So let's wrap this up.
Overall, I say the GoPro is just overall the better camera
across the board.
The image just looks better,
it has more power,
it's easier to use in my opinion.
But of course, AKASO's biggest advantage
is that price point at $119.
So of course, when you can't swing the $350
for a GoPro HERO8,
this seems like a decent budget option.
You could also get something like an older GoPro
like the HERO5 Black,
I've seen those on sale,
some of them used for $140 to $160,
so that's an option, too.
Do any of you guys want this, by the way?
I'll ship this out to someone in the notification squad.
You drop a comment in the first two hours
of this video going live,
and one of you guys will get this.
All right.
Time for some comments from my last video
which was about how I recorded a 24 hour straight vlog,
no cuts, no nothing.
"Wait a minute, the Sony recorded all that
"without overheating and shutting down in LA?"
Of course it cut once 13 hours and one minute
because that turns out
that's what the Sony A6600's actual record time limit is.
It's not no record time limit,
it's 13 hours and one minute.
I was also concerned about it overheating,
but yeah, the A6600 seems pretty solid.
That, I think, is probably going to be my next video,
about the A6600.
"This reminds me of "The Truman Show"."
That's exactly how I felt. (laughs)
Kyle says, "This video has officially made me want
"to just film and document how life in 2020 is like.
"Maybe people will watch it in 50 years,
"and be like whoa!"
Imagine if we have vlogs
from the 1500's or something like that.
I did also challenge you guys to just pick up a camera
and record for 24 minutes straight,
and upload that as a vlog,
and a handful of you guys are doing it,
so that's cool.
I've been watching these
and these have actually been really entertaining,
especially when they're from a different place.
This one's from Spain,
and pretty sure this one was from Sweden.
This has been really cool
seeing just super raw footage from all over the world.
Looks like some new ones popped up,
so I'll have to check these out.
All right, see you guys later.
(music)