'All-Terrain' Camera

It looks like an old-school SLR camera wrapped in waterproof housing. But the ATC9K All-Terrain HD Video Camera, a new product from Oregon Scientific of Tualatin, Ore., is an HD-recording, shock-resistant shooter that’s waterproof up to 65 feet underwater.

The $299.99 camera shoots video up to 1080p (1,920 × 1,080 pixels at 30 frames per second) and photos at 5-megapixels of resolution. It has a microphone for recording audio and a fixed wide-angle lens with no zoom. A built-in laser pointer helps align shots.

Unlike many video cameras made for the outdoors, the ATC9K has an LCD screen on back, letting you preview footage in the field. The screen is a 1.5-inch TFT color display, and the camera has a built-in speaker so you can hear the audio while viewing footage.

Oregon Scientific (www2.oregonscientific.com) offers the ATC9K with mounting options including straps and suction cups for helmets, bike handlebars, surfboards, snowboards, kayak hulls, and more. The camera measures about 2 × 1.7 × 4 inches and weighs about 7 ounces.

A bonus feature is the camera’s built-in “G-sensor,” which measures the force of gravity during acceleration, deceleration and hang time. This allows users to download and examine the details of their “flight time” via gravitational data collected by the sensor inside.

The ATC9K has a rechargeable lithium-ion battery pack and it charges with a USB cable plugged into a computer or via a wall outlet. On a full charge, you get about 1.5 hours of continuous video recording, the company says.

The camera has 32MB of internal memory. But you must use a microSD memory card to capture footage. It supports cards up to 32GB in capacity.

Next month, the company plans to offer an optional GPS module that can be plugged into the camera. Like the ContourGPS, which I previewed earlier on the blog, the ATC9K’s GPS hardware will allow you to map your location, speed and distance traveled. It displays this information using Google Maps or Google Earth, and users can show off their GPS data alongside the helmet-cam footage captured at the scene.

—Stephen Regenold is founder and editor of www.gearjunkie.com.