So at the moment, Action Cameras are coming from everywhere
with varying prices and build quality. Chinese company, Xiaomi better known for
making low price high-quality smartphones and tablets has launched their own
action camera without sacrificing quality at a budget-friendly price tag.
What’s Inside the Box
My Thoughts
What’s Inside the Box
Let’s go quick inside the content of the box. What I have is
the white Xiaomi Yi Sports Camera Travel Edition. The box is lot bigger than
the normal box to make room for Yi Monopod included in the Travel Edition.
Other than that, all you get is the instruction and manual in Chinese which
doesn’t help me any. It also has a short micro USB cable for charging, a
1,010mAh replaceable battery, and the camera itself. All that for about
Php4,500 or around $94. Whereas the camera by itself cost roughly around
Php3,700 or around $79. So basically you got a decent quality monopod for about
$15 nothing more and nothing less. On separate purchase, I bought a hard
plastic case for the Yi cam for extra protection for just $2 and a Samsung Evo
microSD card for $18.
The Yi Camera
What I bought was the white color. But there’s also another
color in jungle green which I’m not a huge fan and found it like a toy of a 3
year old kid. The whole exterior shell is plastic so no rubber or any kind of
soft touch materials just good old-fashioned hard brittle plastic. So briefly
going over the ports and the buttons on the front next to the camera lens is
the multi-purpose power button which also acts as the button between photo and
video modes. It has a bright LED ring around it to indicate the battery life.
At the top, it has the photo shutter button which also acts as the video recording
button with the red LED indicator next to it to let you know when you’re
recording or not. And next to that is the microphone. There’s nothing on the
right side of the camera but on the left we have the WiFi toggle button with a
blue LED indicator light above to let you know when the WiFi on or off. On the
back, we’ve got two covers. The one on the left is where all our ports and
slots are housed under so we’ve got micro USB for charging, micro SD card slot
which supports up to 64GB, and micro HDMI port and on the right side which houses
the 1,010mAh replaceable battery. And lastly on the bottom, we have our
standard tripod threading as well as another LED indicator letting you know
what’s you’re recording or not.
Yi Camera App
Now you’re probably thinking by now how we interface with it
and start taking advantage of that 16 Megapixel Sony Exmor Sensor that Xiaomi
was kind enough to include. First you have to download the Yi camera app. You
can download it via Google Play or at the Apple App Store. The version I’ve
downloaded is the latest one, version 1.11.1. Now once you’ve downloaded, the
first thing you going to do is to power on the Yi camera by pressing and
holding the power button until you see the ring light up. Once it’s done, you
can press the WiFi button and wait for it to change from solid blue to flashing
blue LED. Once it’s flashing, you launch the Yi app. You may check first if you
had the latest firmware on your camera. My Yi Camera has an outdated firmware
version so I’ve downloaded the latest one. To check and update it, go to app’s
settings located on the top right of the app, then tap firmware download. The
app downloaded the newer version 1.2.10. The app has a bunch of feature page on
its homepage, just ignore that and tap that camera button. Once you’re there,
you’ll notice a pretty nice interface for the current resolution, aspect ratio
for the camera, and frames per second for the video are all displayed above the
viewfinder as well as the camera’s current battery status. At the middle
bottom, there’s your camera shoot button as well as the gallery on the left and
the other options aside from photo shooting like Timer, Time-Lapse, Burst,
Video, Sight and Time Lapse on the right. At the top right is the settings
button.
Photo shoot at 4608x3456 4:3 16MP
 |
| at Pass Island with a gloomy weather |
 |
| aurumOne Hotel room |
 |
| at beach side of Bellevue Resort in Panglao Island, Bohol |
Video recording at 1080p at 60 FPS
My Thoughts
So as you can see high quality looks little overly
processed. You also notice that there’s no such thing as image stabilization
with the Yi cam. Lowering the FPS should help a tiny bit but not much. Battery
life on a 1,010mAh battery won’t last your whole day if that you were hoping
for. Recording in 1080p at 60 FPS pretty much 1 hour before you need to charge
again which takes you about 90 minutes. If you’re planning to use this on
vacation and use it a lot. I do suggest taking a power bank or buying a second or
even a third battery. As far as the accessories, most people I heard can use
their GoPro accessories with the Yi cam. Unfortunately, the waterproof case is
not one of them. But you can find a number of waterproof case compatible with
the Yi cam even an official Yi camera waterproof case for about Php1,400 or
about $30. So I think if you’re in the market for an action camera and are
planning to use it as one with getting it wet and dirty but don’t have the
money for the GoPro, the Yi cam is the perfect option BUT, I’d suggest
investing in at least both the waterproof case and hard plastic case which
altogether will set you back for around Php6,000 or $130 for everything you
need including the camera which I think that’s pretty damn unbeatable deal.
Xiaomi Yi Specs
8 Sensor : Sony Exmor R BSI CMOS 16 million pixel
15 Lens : 16MP CMOS F2.8 155° wide angle
15 Lens : 16MP CMOS F2.8 155° wide angle
Size : 6 x 2.1 x 4.2 cm / 2.36 x 0.83 x 1.65 inches
WiFi
4 Operating modes
Memory : Micro SD up to 64GB
Video Recording
1080p x (60, 48, 30 and 24 fps)
960p x (60fps or 48fps)
720P x (120, 60, 48fps)
480P x (240fps)
Video System: PAL, NTSC
Video Format: MP4
Sound Sampling 96KHz Channel 2 Signal to noise ratio 92dBA
Battery 1010mAh
Charging : USB via PC or AV with adapter
Bluetooth 4.0
Image Format : JPEG
Self Timer: 1-15s
Time Lapse 0,5/1/2/5/10/30/60 sec
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