When you’re using a camera to capture your moves on skis, bike, board or whatever, you want it to be small, lightweight, tough and adaptable and the JVC GC-XA2 Adixxion achieves all of these things as well as being pretty easy to use and having a whole heap of excellent features.
It fits into the palm of your hand and can be quickly and easily mounted on your weapon of choice (although it only comes with one mount – you’ll need to purchase extra mounts if you want to use it for different sports) with the option of either vertical or horizontal mounting.
It weighs 135g so whilst you can feel that you’ve got it attached to your helmet it’s not heavy enough to have any noticeable effect, and best of all for me was the fact that you can pretty much use it straight out of the box.
No external housing is required (it’s shockproof, waterproof, freezeproof and dustproof– ours survived a couple of fairly nasty tumbles in the snow and a brief immersion in water without any problem at all) and there’s an LCD screen and Wi-Fi built in so you don’t need to add any extra modules.
Using the Adixxion is also pretty straightforward – literally just press the recording button and away you go. The recording functions include 1920 x 1080 60p/50p full HD video as well as 120fps/100fps 1280 x 720 high-speed recording for slow motion footage.
The Wi-Fi feature enables real-time checking of your footage as well as live streaming over the Internet, and it can also use itself as an access point for streaming live to a smartphone or to USTREAM, for uploading to YouTube, and for still image transfer, whilst a ‘Quad View’ function available on the Adixxion sync. app allows the video streams from four separate Adixxion cameras to be viewed simultaneously on a smartphone screen.
To be honest we didn’t get round to using the above features but they all seem straightforward enough and obviously mean you can enjoy irritating your friends at home by uploading your holiday action literally moments after you record it.
Other useful features include four built-in visual effects to individualise your videos, time-lapse recording for photos as well as video, burst mode for multiple stills at up to 15 frames per second, and Simultaneous REC which enables photo and video shooting at the same time.
As mentioned before the Adixxion can be used instantly for basic shooting and the more techie features are easy enough to work through with the user guide, and as a means of capturing your outdoor action in high quality it’s an excellent little piece of kit.
About the only thing we could find to make a very minor complaint about was that the controls can be a little tricky to use when you’re wearing gloves, but there again you can’t have a small camera and expect it to feature huge controls.
Other than that, we like it a lot.
