Review: The three cheapest video cameras found on eBay

Category : Electronics

First of all this review has nothing to do with my previous blog post about the 808 #16 camera as I haven’t got mine yet.

So, lets introduce our three tiny video cameras.

Mini DV 808 Car Key Chain

Price is typically around 6-8 USD, this little key chain camera has nothing to do with the real #16, except they use the same plastic housing. Video quality isn’t great, it’s blurry and hard to see any details if there are movements. The camera also struggles if the brightness changes, etc going from indoors to outdoors. Or pointing the camera towards a window. The bottom line is, don’t buy it! You will be better off with the real 808, even if it costs a bit more. This camera weighs 13,9 grams with the metal key-hook removed.

Mini DV MD80

Price for this camera generally lays around 8-11 USD, it comes with allot of different mounts. The general quality feel of the housing is good, you get the impression it’s more well built than the other cameras in this test. Video quality is decent, it’s the best from these three cameras I’ve tested so far. Weight of the camera is 19,4 grams.

5MP Smallest Mini DV

This is the most expensive camera in this review, it’s priced from around 11-16 USD, in video quality it’s better than the 808-clone, and not as good as the MD80. Even tho the resolution on the recordings are high, but the compression makes it blurry and not all that good. One thing I noticed this camera cuts the recording into several files, highly annoying! The weight for the camera is 15 grams.

 

There we go, three of the cheapest eBay mini dv`s tested! I’ll add a video soon, showing the quality of each camera.

Bad quality shield bought on eBay

Category : Arduino, Electronics

I was looking for some cheap shields for my Arduino board, and stumbled across a very inexpensive proto shield. A well known seller with good reputation had it laying around for only 7,65 $, so it couldn’t be that bad.

Well, after a couple of weeks it arrived in the mail. And here are a few things I noticed:


Looks like it’s rusted and kind of old?


Not even close to nice solderings…


Some plastic is melted off? 😛

Well, its not worth that much and it actually works, but for how long?

Whats most annoying is how the seller can say that its Quality and New!