If anyone is looking for a super cheap helmet cam, these things from ebay are the ticket, they are called MD80, they are knock off's of a more expensive camera, but they upped the specs!   Mine is a  720x480 version, they sell for 15 $,  mine was 11 $ + 4 $ to ship from china.  These are not gopro/vholdr quality,  they will suffer from "rolling shutter"  as do gopro/vholder, because they are cmos cameras.  CCD/lipstick cameras are the only ones that do a full frame image at a time, rather than a scan top to bottom,  and wont have any rolling shutter, but those all have a bunch of wires you have to deal with.

I added a "jelly lens" wide angle for the front, basically they are stick on wide angle lenses, they go for a couple bucks on ebay,  they can be glued permanently on.  This camera has a built in rechargable batter that will record for ~2 hours.   For your nefarious needs, it can do sound activated recording,  I wont give you any ideas.  It'll do about 40 minutes per gig, so a 2 gig card will fill before the battery,  they can be sensitive to cards, so you want a class 6 card microSD card.   It'll also act as a webcam, I have not tried that yet.   There's a bunch of reviews online, because they are super cheap, small and light, they are getting strapped onto all sorts of things, lots of info on them on the RC airplane forums.

This is what you get for 15 $, I put quarters on/around it for scale, sorry my iphone takes horrible pictures





Sample video of with and without the jelly lens, you can tell it makes the view quite a bit wider. I will try to get some helmetcam footage this week to test out the video and sound.  The sound will pick up wind, so I'll probably have to use some black or friction tape over the microphone hole.  There's lots of videos on youtube from these things already.

Good find MegaDeth, you really can't ask for much more at that price, I will be purchasing one.

Great post!  I just bought one for $11.99 with free shipping.  I also bought the jelly lens for $2.00.  I will report back when I try it out!

Which seller did you buy from and how long did it take for shipping?

I bought this auction 280525226877

I won & paid for it on june 23rd, and it arrived today,  I buy lots of stuff from china, and typically it takes 10 days if there's no holidays in there

Thanks for the info. I think I'm going to order myself one right now!

How does it connect to the helmet? 3M tape? I can't see anything in the picture that would connect it to a helmet...
And could you possibly link me to the one you bought? The ones I'm finding don't come with the wall adapter, which is the only way to fully charge ther battery according to them. They all sell em seperately...

I might have to order up one of these..  seems pretty cool!  the footage on youtube doesnt look half bad either.

We have two of them. For the price, it's seriously hard to beat. Video quality for such a cheap item is very impressive too! I'm gonna have to check out that jelly lense, definitely seems to help.

use velcro or double sided tape to attach

I have the exact same one. i keep it in my trucks ash tray should i ever need a video cam. low light and video quality arent the best but for the price you cant beat it.

i just ordered one too. hope its not to good to be true

Thanks for the little review, I just bought one and the lens.

I'm on it!! Thanks, Megadeth:worthy:, I'm sick of spending $100 on everything you buy these days:foul:

$12.48 shipped. What could possibly go wrong?

Hmm I might have to look into one of these. My nephew keeps saying we need a helmet cam for our dirt rides, but I can't seem to ever scrape up the $100 for the cheapo GoPro model.

Well, I decided to purchase one also. What sold me was going to youtube and searching for footage from this item. It wasn't as good as the expensive cameras, but sure cannot beat the price and what it offers!

The footage should be better than what you see on Youtube. All the vids I watched on there using this camera are at best 480 and they still look pretty good. They seem to have pretty good light transition but really noisy or nearly nonexistant audio. Another note, remember, these are not waterproof!

Now, I'm ready for it to get here!

I'm gonna try this for sure. But you guys that are buying the ones that are like $12, know that they don't come with the memory card things, right? It seems like to buy the ones that come with a memory card are like $20-23.

I just ordered one too   Is there a certain Jelly Lense i need or do they all work?