The Contour ROAM is up on Amazon for $127 bucks. The comparable GoPro is like $300
It's a really nice camera and a solid alternative to the Go Pro. It records at 1080p, 720p, and continuous picture mode.
The downside, and a big one, is that the company has filed for bankruptcy.
… so no support, no returns, etc.
The upside, is that I bought one and it looks like it's somewhat hackable.
It seems finicky about SD cards so I bought a Class 10 , 32GB card.. .which is 8 hours of continuous video at 720p.
You basically slide the switch to the on position and it records videos and dumps a .mov file onto the SD card which is just a normal filesystem that you can mount on your mac/pc.
There is a config file on the SD card which you can edit to change settings. It's pretty straight forward.
If you want a general purpose HD camera for backpacking/cycling, this is a decent solution.
I bought it for backpacking but I'm also going to use it as an insurance policy while I'm on my bike… so if someone cuts me off or hits me then I have video.
I'm going to have to see if it's worth bringing it on a trip. I"m going to try to mount it to my frame/pack and put it in continuous picture mode.
I can basically NEVER remember to take pics when I backpack and this way I get hundreds of them from now on…
One other cool thing is that you can hack it so that you can have it load a new config when you swap in an SD card.
So you could have one SD card for 720p video and one for continuous pictures.
I might actually buy two since they're so cheap and I've already overcome the learning curve for hacking this thing.
