Gadgetory

I'm not going to sugarcoat this every Chinese GoPro wannabe makes these unbelievable claims about great full HD or even 4k video recording for 60 bucks or whatever but every single one of them that I have ever touched has been obviously converting the data from some horrendous 640 by 480 sensor if you're lucky not to mention that many of them have a completely unusable UI so to call my expectations going into this review of the Yi action camera too low would be very generous so then to say that I was blown away would be an understatement cooller masters master case maker five features they're freeform modular system allowing you to customize adjust and upgrade make it yours through the link in the video description let's start with the basics I've got the selfie stick kit which includes the Yi 2 camera as I'll be referring to it for the rest of the video a battery a kind of cheap feeling clip on plastic shutter button and a surprisingly robust selfie stick with a locking telescopic well I guess it's a stick terminated with a quarter-inch threaded post and a smartphone holder bracket that screws on to the one side down here at the bottom it's not perfect by reversing the gender of the threading or including an adapter it could have been used to put a phone at the end of the stick when you are not using the Yi 2 and the top swivel could be a bit more flexible which would both be welcome improvements to its general usefulness but I can't fault the selfie sticks build quality overall which brings us to the camera itself it's pretty plastic II feeling another dollar or two would inspire more confidence in this product but hey as long as she's got it where it counts right at the bottom is the battery and micro SDXC compartment along with the female quarter-inch mount at the front is the F 2.8 7-element 155 degree wide angle lens covering a sony IMX 377 twelve point three five megapixel affective CMOS image sensor capable of 4k video or 12 megapixel stills along with a status indicator light on the side is a micro USB charging port on the top are the dual microphone ports and a speaker grille wait a minute why would it need a speaker ah yes because on the back the entire back of the unit is taken up by 640 by 360 pixel wide format touchscreen and if you've ever had a major video project riding on correctly framing a shot with a gopro hero4 black you will surely appreciate this inclusion and the implementation isn't half-assed either the viewfinder is butter smooth and so was the menu navigation so whether you're changing settings or reviewing a clip you just shot all of which is doable over Wi-Fi with the GoPro app by the way eliminating this step especially with a multicam setup where things can get jostled mid shoot like we frequently find ourselves in a lot of time and guesswork can be saved and the u2 actually supports changing all those settings and previewing your shot live through they're mostly stable app on your phone if you prefer that approach as well though none of that would be valuable if the shots from your perfectly positioned camera looked like trash would it so let's have a look at some 4k 30fps footage first compared to the only camera from GoPros lineup that also shoots at that resolution the hero4 black so overall whether we're talking about low-light performance auto white balance scene brightness change response or really anything else I was really impressed by this little camera and that's without having access to some of the modes that only work at lower resolutions the sixaxis electronic image stabilization that only works if you're shooting at resolutions below 4k and no higher than 60 frames per second is freaking cool and probably worth it for some people to drop all the way down to 1080p in order to take advantage of it though on that subject I really wish that 2560 by 1440 was a shooting option since it would be a balance between having some sensor left to enable anti-shake and also having the ability to crop and punch in your footage though I'm not going to deduct too many marks for this given how impressive this camera is at half of what we paid for the action cams that we use for most of our projects with the biggest shocker yet to come the battery life we are used to taking a caseload of replacement batteries on any GoPro shoot and switching over to a fleet of Yi 2's would cut in half the frequency with which we need to replace them with sound quality being yet another strong point I mean sure it's not perfect it's not as good as a lav my or a boom like but when you're speaking directly into the camera from selfie distance even with a fair amount of background noise it's a fast and easy way to get surprisingly usable audio so I'm in China courtesy of ZTE ZTE can ever keep track of what the Canadian way is check out this hotel room alright press conference is over it's time to join back up with Brendon series out on b-roll for the gap camera with the camera as long as you're not using the waterproof case though I've yet to find any action cam that has really solved that problem on that note they're 40 metre polycarbonate and glass waterproof housing is not included with the kit we got but while I don't have pricing for it yet based on the last generation ye camera it should land in the ten to thirty dollar range it doesn't allow the use of the touchscreen obviously but the top button lets you do all of the essentials power start/stop record and power off and this is great it uses a GoPro compatible mounting system which I guess leads us right into the usual issue with any action cam that isn't a GoPro the relatively immature accessory ecosystem now some stuff that's not available for the u2 can be ignored the waterproof case accessory makes it compatible with many GoPro mounts including head chest and even scuba suit etc but the first party one anyway lacks a more acoustically friendly backing for audio recording while using those GoPro accessories and I also don't see an obvious solution for non mounting related accessories like external battery chargers nothing seems to be available at this time meaning that you will need to charge your batteries in your camera just fine for casual users but pros are going to want something a little bit beefier so they can charge more of them at a time however if that drawback in your mind is easily overcome by the price the screen the footage quality and that quarter-inch mount I won't entirely disagree with you of course it remains to be seen if GoPro will come storming back with the hero five lineup later this year in the meantime though I'll be watching the u2 very very closely Tunnel bear is the simple VPN app that makes it easy to browse the web privately and enjoy well a more open Internet and the best part about it is that it is easy to use and free for your first 500 Meg's of data but what does it do exactly well when you hit the button that turns tunnel bear on two things happen number one is that your connection gets encrypted with AES 256-bit encryption and number two is that based on whatever you selected in a drop-down up to 20 different countries you will appear to the websites and web services that you use as though you are browsing from that other country so you could be from the UK or America or whatever the case may be now if you try out tunnel bear we've got a link in the video description that is tunnel bear comm /l TT and you go wow gee this is really great you can actually save 10% on an unlimited plan by using that link so again that's tunnel bear comm /l tt so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button or even consider supporting us directly using our affiliate code to shop at Amazon instructions up there buying cool shirt like this one or with a direct monthly contribution through our community forum linked in the video description now that you're done doing all that stuff you probably wanted Rin come to you which I watch next everything's fine so click that little button in the top right corner to check out our latest video over on channel super-fun it'll be fun maybe even super fun