Hi, just want to share my experience with my Intova Sport Pro HD for the folks who havent made up their minds whether to buy it or not.
I guess the stakes have change slightly in that the new GOPro 3 series is now being released (which now has a suitable underwater lens casing and price range)! Also, as I mentioned in my previous post, Intova have announced an improved version of their SP1
However, i started having problems with it just a few dives after. It started dying in the middle of my dives. I would use it on my first dive and by the time I get back to the boat the camera becomes unresponsive and cannot be turned on, rendering it useless for the second dive. At first I attributed the fault to a weak battery and just accepted it as part of the design of the unit. However, whenever i charge it after my dives it showed that the battery is still full. I found it weird but let it go. Then after a few more dives the intova camera died on me and refused to be turned on even after charging the unit and while charging the unit.
Rderige, this is not the first time I read such a comment where someone has reported this type of behaviour.
- How long ago did you buy your original SP1?
- What is the firmware version on your new replacement SP1?
I wonder if there was an earlier batch of faulty cameras! I had a slightly different experience where mine switched off during a dive after round 15mins of recording. When I noticed, I switched it back on and happily when on to record for a further 47mins without issues. That was the only time I had such a problem. However, I have not had it long, so decided to do an experiment to retest things (and I got a weird result)!
I fully charged the camera. Using an empty SDcard of 8GB class 10, I left the camera recording overnight to presumably give a footage of around 2+ hours (i.e. until the battery ran flat or the cards was full)
In the morning when I checked the results, there were several clips.
- 59:00 mins
- 31:26
- 22:55
- 16:27
- 11:40
- 08:10
- 05:11
Totalling 2h:34m:49s
It seems that the camera stopped recording and then restarted again automatically (several times) or simply spilt the total footage into separate files/clips – each time with the next sequence/clip being shorter than the previous.
As it was during the night, it was dark :dunce: and I could check for discontinuities in the sequences of the clips – so I will redo the test again, only this time I will set the time stamp option.
Now, I realise that this is rather academic :dozingoff: and that when diving I will not be recording a continuous clip for hours on end. Nevertheless this should not be a limitation (provided the camera is fully charged and card capacity permits) and my concern would be more when wearing the camera somewhere (e.g. attached to the tank), where you cannot see if it has switched off (not until the end of the dive, that is)!
- What has been the experiences others – has anyone else had a similar problem of the camera switching off by itself for no apparent reason?
- Have you all just been taking short clips or has someone succeeded in recording lengthy footages time after time?
- Are you generally recording at 1080p or lower?
Otherwise, as for the quality and functionality of the camera, its a gem:goingdown:
---------- Post Merged at 03:51 PM ---------- Previous Post was at 03:42 PM ----------
Hey, so I received the firmware upgrade from Intova and it seems to address the problem. Want to thanks Joe and William for their quick responses, 2 thumbs up for their excellent customer service!!
Cool,
So what version are you at now?