Toshiba Camileo X-Sports Camera

Managed to pick up a very little used Toshiba Camileo X-Sports camera. It belongs in the same range of cameras as the Go Pro but for far less money. The Toshiba version comes complete with waterproof casing and a range of fixings for mounting it. Without the case it is a very dinky size:



It has a fixed wide angle lens which focusses from about 30cm to infinity, 12M pixel sensor  and built in WiFi (which is very useful as there is an app for iOS and Android devices which can control the settings of the camera, operate the shutter and gives a live view of what the camera sees). It also comes with a wrist control which can also be used to control the camera but is much more basic. There is the facility for up to 10x digital zooming though that will obviously affect the picture quality. On the back of the camera is a 2 inch LCD. A microSD card is needed for storage.

Yeserday I just had time for a quick fiddle with the camera to work out what does what and make sure it was working OK. Along with various qualities of movie and frame rates, still photos and burst shots it can be used for time lapse photography. This was a quick trial looking through the bedroom window. One shot every 2 seconds:



The Toshiba doesn't make the video. It just saves the stills. These can be dragged and dropped to the laptop once plugged into the USB port. One problem I found was that the camera stores two photos for ever still shot. One is full quality, the other being a thumbnail which is what is sent to the app for the live view. That made it a lengthy job choosing only the full quality photos. These were then process using a free program called Time Lapse Assembler. This used the full size of each frame:




The resulting movie was then cropped to 16:9 in iMovie. As can be seen there is distortion noticeable at the edges of the view as a result of the wide angle lens. I think it has about 135 degrees view.