In this blog I have decided to test a cheaper 'APEMAN Action Camera' against a 'Go Pro Hero Black' to show you that a cheaper go pro camera is perfectly good and useful for recording your daily events, blogs, speeches, seminars etc for a fraction of the price.
So for this Test I took both cameras, fully charged one battery in each overnight and set them both recording at the same time pointed at a clock so I could see they were both sync'd and recording the same image for almost the same angle in the same conditions.
The results were quite surprising considering the price difference between the two cameras.
The Go Pro Black retails at around £294 and the Apeman Action Camera £49 (price sourced from google on 24th January 2019).
I found that the Apeman camera is a very simple camera with only 4 buttons to control the menu and functions. once I had played around with it for a few min I had figured out how it worked as its very straight forward.
I found the Hero Black to be a little more complicated. It took me a while to figure out where the cover was for the charge and how to operate the menu as this is touch screen and the camera it's self is waterproof which means the cover and the ports are all sealed making them sometimes difficult to get off to access.
The Apeman is a lot lighter but the camera it's self is not waterproof as it has a case which it lives inside to provide the waterproofing. Another down side of this is that if you wish to use it under water the case provides a seal so good the mic doesn't pickup a lot of sound unlike the Hero which picks up superb sound even when in water.
The Apeman camera does however have a second case which has vents for the sound to get in through and only makes the camera splash proof.
Lets face it if you were using this for a business purpose and not an sport or action setting the waterproofing would not be required, i certainly wouldn't have many uses for the camera in water.
The Apeman camera SD card is located on the side of the camera with the usb and hdmi ports.
The Hero Black is located inside the cover with the battery and I found I had to remove the battery to get it out (big fingers).
So to the picture quality, both cameras have a class 10 micro SD card inside, the hero can do 4k however the apeman camera I am testing only does 1080p so for this test i have used 1080p on both cameras for fairness.
The Ape man recorded for 10 minutes less than the Hero Black and the quality of the picture is almost identical, however the Apeman Records in .MOV where as the Hero Black .MP4, for editing either of these file types will work fine with Premier Pro or with Black Magic Resolve but MP4 is a more popular file extension these days.
The Hero Black records in bursts of 17 and half min where as the Apeman records in bursts of 25min. so the Apeman recorded for around 2 hours continuously and the Hero Black for 10 min more both on a fully charged battery.
Now for editing purposes when the Apeman files save you loose a few frames whilst it does this, I expected that the Hero wouldn't however it also looses some frames not as many but there is still a jump when joining the files together.
There are lots of other test we could do with these two cameras, both have their ups and downs and really it totally depends on what your planning to do with them that matters. if you need a camera to capture images of you doing things in your business to use in your social media videos or even stockpile footage to send to a company like us to make show reels, short videos or even to do how to videos with your footage, I would recommend the Apeman Action Cam you get plenty of clips and different fittings and little extra and the camera its self is very easy to use, the best part is the price at £49 for the HD camera and around £59 for the 4k version this kind of money means if it gets lost damaged or stolen your not reeling as much as paying alot more for a camera that's only better in certain circumstances.
There's two links below to the Apeman Action Cameras both the 1080p and the 4k version. I would urge all business owners to purchase one and keep it with you as you never know when it could come in useful.