I've been scuba diving for a long time. I had an 8mm camcorder that I built a waterproof housing for. That evolved into digital cameras. When the Hero2 came out, I jumped on it and was very pleased with the results… and smallness of the camera. I have tried to replace the Hero2 with an inexpensive Action Camera that claimed to do 4K video. This camera just might be the replacement I've been looking for.
If you have the budget and need a camera as good as a newer GoPro, this is probably not the camera you want to buy. But if you're wanting something a bit cheaper that does fairly well. You should consider this camera.
This is just for the "Brave 7 LE". I don't have any experience with other AKASO camera models. At the time of this review, the Brave 7 LE has already been replaced with a Brave 8
For image stabilization… It does fairly well. It certainly does better than my Hero2 (that doesn't have any image stabilization). But I have a cheap 4K drone that has much better image stabilization. With image stabilization on, and attempting to pan in a fairly smooth arch, I still see a bit of jumping and I see some of the "time-warp" artifacts you will sometimes get. The jumping might be caused by the storage not being able to keep up, but I am using a freshly formatted 32G SanDisk Extreme card.. I use the same card in my cheap 4K drone and don't get any jumping.
Picture quality… On a sunny day, the image quality is very good… I wouldn't say excellent…. but very good. It appears that the sensor might do 4K natively, but I can't verify that. Many of their cameras specifically call out being "Native 4K30". This camera does not. But at 4K30, I am capturing video that is higher resolution that what I can display all at once (I don't have a 4K monitor or TV). Low light is where this camera has its greatest challenge. I don't have a tool to measure the quantity of light, but the image quality degrades more quickly in lower light than my older android phone. The camera has an "auto low light" mode. When that's turned on, the image quality is actually worse in a low light scenario.
"Picture Quality" and "Image Stabilization" are both impacted by some of the other features of this camera. It essentially has a "digital zoom" feature under "view angle". It appears that more of the sensor is used to provide a wider viewing angle. The camera does a nice job of reducing the fish-eye distortion when you're using the wider viewing angle, but that seems to use even more of the sensor as well as the processor. It appears that higher refresh rates at lower resolution have better image quality. If your highest priority is image quality, you might try a lower resolution and a higher refresh (like 1080p60).
There are some really nice pictures and videos used in the product description page. If those pictures and videos were taken with this camera, I expect a lot of post-production work was done to make them look as good as they do. My pictures and videos don't look nearly as nice.
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