The 'buy the best, buy it once and keep it forever' lesson was one I learned faster in some areas of life than in others.

Sadly, it took me quite a while to learn it with bulletcams. In fact, I bought three cheaper ones before finally doing what I should have done in the first place and buying a POV1.5.

The rather odd name comes from the fact that the original POV (Point Of View) model was the POV1, and this model is an evolution of that rather than dramatic upgrade, so they called it the POV1.5 instead of the POV2.

My main usage is for work, but I also use it when cycling, so that's the perspective I'll cover here.

Why the POV1.5?

There are a great many bulletcams on the market now, some of the cheap Chinese knockoffs on ebay priced from as little as £13! Even ignoring these (which have wavery video that makes you feel sea-sick and probably have a lifetime measured in weeks), you can get a pretty decent bulletcam now for around £100, so why pay £500?

For me, the POV1.5 had three main things going for it ...

First, battery-life. Most bulletcams have a battery-life of around 40 minutes. That's fine if you just want to video a short commute, but rather less useful if you want to video a day's ride. The POV1.5 4xAA batteries last 4-6 hours. Card capacity also matches this, an 8Gb card storing 6 hours of DVD-quality footage. If you needed more, a spare set of AAs and a spare card means that a single change of each would cover a 10-12 hour day.

Second, one of the great frustrations of all-in-one bulletcams is that they have no screen, so you have no idea whether you have the camera angled right until you watch the footage of the ground or sky later. The POV1.5, in contrast, has a small screen on the recording unit, so you can make sure the camera is correctly positioned and angled before you set off.

Finally, and most convincingly of all, the POV1.5 offers a 'loop' recording mode, in which you can record continuously but only actually save the most interesting bits.

Loop mode?

Let's face it, the average 5-hour bike ride is going to be about five minutes of interesting footage (fast downhills, particularly scenic bits, idiotic drivers, etc) and 4h 55m of stuff you'll never want to watch. The POV1.5 offers two solutions to this, both operated by the same button on the wireless remote.

In normal recording mode, the unit records continuously. But when you press the REC/TAG button, it puts a marker on the recording. When you transfer the video to your PC, you can use the supplied editing software to jump directly to the tagged bits.

But it gets even cleverer. To avoid filling the card with all the stuff you don't want to keep, there's a 'loop' mode. In loop mode, you pick a user-selectable time (I use 5 minutes) and the unit records continuously.

When something interesting happens, just press the REC/TAG button on the remote. It then tags and protects the current five-minute segment. If you were in the first third of that segment (eg. 1 minute in), it also automatically saves the previous five minutes; similarly, if you're in the final third (eg. 4 mins in), it saves the following five minutes too. In that way, you'll always have the bit of interest plus plenty of before and after context.

The existing 5-minute segment is retained just long enough to see if you tag the following one. If not, then it is automatically deleted - so at the end of your ride, you only have the segments you want to keep, with no junk to wade through to find it.

My settings

I have the camera in Loop mode, 5-minute segments, and the screen time-out set to 15 seconds. This means that the screen comes on every five minutes for 15 seconds. With those settings, I get battery-life of just over 6 hours. I can thus cover an entire typical ride without changing batteries, or with a single change if it's a very long day.

Since I'm in Loop mode, card capacity isn't an issue (especially with an 8Gb card), so I have the camera set to maximum quality. This means that if it were ever needed for evidence, we'd have the best-quality footage, and now that youtube accepts hi-res footage and automatically coverts it to reduced qualities, there's no downside.

It's not HD, but is DVD quality. If it were just for cycling use, I might have waited for the HD version (which I'm sure will be along soon), but a work project meant I needed it immediately, and DVD quality is more than good enough.

Mounting options

The POV has an almost endless range of mounts available for it: cycle helmets, ski-goggles, windscreens, roll-cages, you name it, there's a mount for it. The most flexible of these is the 'star mount':

I leave the camera in this the whole time, with a velcro attachment for my helmet, worn when riding the Brompton, and a clever magnet system to attach to my baseball cap when riding the trike (three magnets slot into the empty recesses you see above, and a matching set of three magnets go on the inside of the baseball cap to hold it in place).

Sample footage

This is a 6-minute video of some downhill stretches in Derbyshire (between Wheston and Buxton). It provides a good illustration of the capabilities of the camera, with stretches that are heading straight towards the sun, others that go from light to dark and back, and some very bumpy roads!