The Wrong Side of my Car
The blog that wants to go obsolete
Some thoughts on using the Kaiser Baas X600
A while ago I got this action camera. It is relatively cheap, but waterproof so I can use it in the rain.
With cheap electronics things can go two ways. Often the quality is a bit sub-par, but it otherwise works well enough to get the job done. But sometimes it is just too cheap and nasty and you’ll have to go back to the shop for something better.
Kaiser Baas definitely sits in this category. It is not super cheap, but it is way cheaper than a GoPro. What did we get?
Image quality
No surprises here. The principle of ‘you get what you pay for’ applies. Even though the camera has a 4K sensor, you’re probably limited to producing 1080p.
At full 4K resolution (4608×3456) the image reminds me a bit of pointillism, likely this is an artefact of heavy noise reduction.
So should you just set up this lower resolution and be done with it? No, there are two nasty gotchas:
- Some resolutions simply crop the image, without any indication of which ones do this.
- When the camera records at a lower resolution it seems to do this by skipping pixel rows on the sensor, instead of downsampling the image. So the quality goes way down.
Oh, shit.
So I’m more or less stuck with leaving the camera on full resolution, and downscaling everything when I copy it from the SD card.
Video
Video quality is identical to the image quality, and the same gotchas apply. The observant reader may at this point figure out that the 720p120 slow motion will be of pretty low quality.
When recording in 4K the camera produces around 340 MB per minute of video. That is going to be rescaled right away to 1080p.
I’m going to mount this camera on my bicycle. Will the gyro stabilisation smooth out the bumps in the road? Not quite. The shaking improves but it introduces a visible warping effect in the video. Overall I think it is still better than not using the gyro.
Here is some video footage around sunset. The middle part of the video has the gyro stabilisation switched off.
The quality is tolerable, although not great, even after downsizing. On the other hand it does a reasonable good job in high contrast situations, like when riding towards the low sun. It was getting dark, for those into photography my old digital camera chose an exposure of ISO 200, 1/100s and f/4.0 (but with a .
A few other random observations:
- You can set up a manual ISO value. It is possible to choose ISO 100, but this is underexposed even under full noon sunlight.
- There are some white balance options, but not for any light source invented after the 1990’s.
- The field of view is very wide, as is common with action cameras. The 35 mm equivalent focal length is about 15 mm, or a horizontal field of view of just over 90°.
Wireless control — one word, nope.
The camera can be controlled via a smartphone app (not via a PC), using Wi-Fi. The camera always creates its own access point, so for those using Wi-Fi internet, you will have to disconnect it and switch to the camera.
It was, uh… interesting. You will get the camera view on your smartphone, and you can switch between video and stills, and between resolutions. So far so good.
But it will also try to update the camera with new firmware. This firmware is bad, and it will brick the camera. Once downloaded it will also silently update any camera you connect to it. Ask me how I know, and why I had to exchange a dead camera at the shop twice. *2
Also in case you’re wondering, over USB it will only transfer files, you can’t use this camera as a webcam. But it does have an extra port which I think is a micro-HDMI port.
Using the camera
There’s not much to using an action camera, at least not for me. Put it into the mount, fix it, tightly, and press the record button.
The buttons require a fair amount of force to press, to the point where you have to be careful to not injure yourself if you’re at any risk of RSI. Mercifully, apart from switching the camera on and taking pictures and video, all functions are controlled with the touch screen.
You can’t mount the camera on anything while the USB cable is plugged in, so for long trips you’re entirely dependent on the battery. On the plus side, the camera is advertised as waterproof to a 12 m depth so it should hold up in rain without the underwater cover.
In conclusion
Overall I think the camera is solidly in the ‘sub-par but useful’ category. Assuming it lasts for a reasonable time. The video is good enough for a 1080p full-HD television, but those with large 4K screens will be disappointed.
I’m not able to upload the original resolution, but honestly you’re not missing anything.
It will drop some files onto the SD card, and the camera will read these files on startup to update. I know this because I saw the files and formatted the SD card after exchanging the first unit. The files reappeared on the fresh SD card after using the app. You can probably fix this by looking up the app in the Android settings under Apps, and clearing all storage and cache. But I am not risking it. There is no firmware available for download for this camera so you can’t restore it to a working state.
Why did they bother with the 4K sensor at all? Well, you’re in what is called a market of lemons, a market where it is not possible for customers to judge the quality of what they’re buying until after they bought it. Numbers sell, this is why we have 50 megapixel phone cameras, and why Pentium 4 processors had more clock rate than performance. This may sound familiar to people who were into digital cameras 15 years ago, where sometimes cameras with more megapixels had lower quality than their lower megapixel counterparts due to sensor noise.
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