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Reading about so many hit-and-runs, and drivers getting off easy because there was no proof of their negligence, it occurred to me that a small rear-facing camera under the bike seat would provide good evidence in such cases. The problem is rigging up something.
I just learned of a very small video and still camera called the Go-Pro that is actually designed to be mounted on bikes. (and helmets and surfboards and cars etc.) It has a wide lens, a waterproof housing, and can be set to take a 5 megapixel still picture every two seconds. Cost is from $99 to $300 depending on video resolution, but they all seem to take 5 megapixel stills. You can take pictures for more than an hour with the smallest memory card, and just erase and start over if you avoid an incident.
This is starting to sound like spam, but I have no financial interest in this product. There are many famous legal incidents that we would never have heard of if it were not for video or photography. Perhaps if the police and the public saw what leads up to a bicycle injury they might be more sympathetic to cyclists.
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I'm not so sure about the rear-facing aspect -- quite a lot of accidents (left-hook, right-hook, folks deciding to run a stop light because surely they can outrun a cyclist) wouldn't be caught by a rear-facing camera. I've been thinking about this for a while, and my inclination is a helmet cam with proper a/v support; the helmet mount means your head provides shock absorption and steadies the video, and ensures that anything which catches your attention gets tracked (unlike a fixed mount). Doesn't help for surprises from the rear, but the statistics in the TS101 class made it clear that barring cases where folks are riding at night without lights (tsk tsk) being hit from the rear is very uncommon.
It's overkill for the purpose, sure, but several folks I know online are happily using the ContourHD to record their rides (mostly much more interesting rides than a daily commute); it's light and built to be easy to stop and start while mounted on a helmet out of your view.
By the way, depending on your budget -- Eye-Fi makes cards now which upload their contents over a wireless connection and delete the oldest contents to make room for new ones. If you set up your phone to share its Internet (or had a dedicated personal hotspot), you could set up an ongoing offsite backup.
Anyhow -- it's an interesting line of thought. I've been pondering such a thing for a while myself -- though between budgetary constraints and limitations on available real estate / mounting options (helmet already has headlight + battery + mirror zip-tied on) it hasn't happened yet.
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Most interesting stuff happens in front of you rather than behind you -- so definitely, if you do one camera, you want it pointing forwards.
As for a helmet cam, it would be OK for evidence, but your head moves a lot so the "shock absorbsion and steadies the video" won't work very well. The best video you'll get would be with it mounted to your frame (not your handlebars -- they move a lot!) or a bar or something sticking forward from your frame. But yes, your helmet cam will get what you're looking at -- so it might be best if you're looking for evidence of crimes. One danger of helmet cams is that you can end up with an hour long recording of the sky -- your camera was pointed wrong. (The ContourHD has a laser to tell you where it's pointed, which can help if you use it.)
A bigger issue is that most of your rides are uneventful. (And if this isn't the case, then you're out looking for trouble, which is another issue entirely.) So you're taking all this video that has nothing interesting happening on it. The GoProHD battery will last about 3 hours, so you're having to charge it every ride or two. A 16 GB card will record longer than the battery will go, but you'll have to erase it after each ride. It turns into a pain in the neck and you'll not want to do it after a while and then it won't be recording when you actually need it.
There is no problem rigging anything up. The GoPro comes with plenty of mounting options, and you can buy lots more.
The picture mode is neat, but for your purposes the video mode would probably be better. In particular, the r4 mode that does 960p and has a wide field of view.
Examples
picture mode: http://flying.frenzied.us/aerial-photog … the_House/
video mode (r4, to be precise): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmFixrunZxE
If you want to play with taking video for a whole lot less money, get one (or more) of the 808 cameras. This page talks about them -- http://www.chucklohr.com/808/
The cameras cost around $13 each if you shop around. Get the best one -- the #3. You'll also want a class 4 or 6 (do not get class 2!) 8 GB micro sd card. (The battery will die after about 1.5 hours, after taking about 6 GB worth of video, so no point in getting a bigger card.)
At that price, you can get three -- one aiming forwards, one aiming back and one on your helmet. The video quality is very mediocre, but certainly good enough to tell what happened, and maybe good enough to catch some license plates in a few frames (maybe.)
They're so small they can be mounted with velcro or tape.
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