Nowadays phones aren’t just phones and with the introduction of the new Garmin VIRB XE, it seems action cameras are no longer just action cameras.
As most of you may know, I swear by Garmin electronics and have a boat full of all their goodies.
And as I film a lot of fishing action on charter (a wet and wild environment) plus I love to slow down the footage of our big fish jumps, I was most interested to chat with Garmin at the Sydney Boat show earlier in the year about their new action camera, the VIRB XE.
It seems Garmin were not interested in making yet another HD camera.
This one is 50 m waterproof straight out of the box (no casing) and packed with data sensors that record things like speed, altitude, G-force, GPS and more.
It also connects wirelessly to compatible devices and sensors so you can capture even more data to overlay onto the video (see photos below), making it even easier to tell a compelling story.
Compatible sensors can record heart rate, hang time and pedaling cadence (if you’re a BMX enthusiast), temperature, automotive engine RPM and fuel rate etc., all via a trademarked system called G-Metrix.
But more importantly, the Garmin VIRB XE can stream wirelessly to the large screen of your Garmin electronics – so you know what you’re filming right there in real time! Bloody brilliant.
So you can turn it on and off and view the recording video right from your sounder screen!
Garmin were kind enough to send me a Garmin VIRB XE to trial and luckily it arrived right before the barra closure.
So I was able to put it through it’s paces with some big barra jumps, as we inch toward our 2000th barra over a metre. Only a few more to go now.
But I digress…
In order to demonstrate the benefits of the camera, I made a quick video of my chat with Garmin at the boat show and also included some of the footage we took with the camera in it’s first period of operation. The footage includes some underwater shots on a family day to Gould Island, fishing for fingermark and of course, some slow-mo barra action.
Here is what the standard unit comes with and you can see the variety of mounting options to get that perfect shot.
For those interested in capturing fishing footage, three main things for me stand out.
- 60fps in 1080 making for great slow motion action.
- 50m waterproof without the use of a case, therefore the audio is great and a welcome relief from the muffled rumblings usually produced by cameras enclosed in waterproof casings.
- Innumerable mounting options for every angle.
To learn more about these great cameras, check out the Garmin Australia website or this Garmin promotional video demonstrating many of the data overlay applications.
If you’re interested in marine electronics, and you’d like to know what I run in my boat, you may be interested in these previous posts;
Transducer mounting tips to improve picture when running at speed.
