Qubo Bike Cam Pro – Can it be used as an Action Camera?
I’ve been getting a lot of questions on social media from followers asking if the Qubo Bike Cam Pro is a good alternative to an action camera like a GoPro or DJI Osmo Action. My reply has been “No”, as I stated in my initial product review. The device is a dash cam and serves the purpose of a dash cam – continuously recording what’s happening in front of the vehicle. It doesn’t even have a button to start or stop recording. In fact, it doesn’t have any buttons to do anything.
But people are quite excited at the prospect of owning something that works like an action camera but costs a fraction of an action camera. Hero Electronix’s marketing isn’t helping the situation either. On their web page, they have listed “Journey Vlogs” as one of the camera’s uses with a picture of a person riding an adventure motorcycle in a valley surrounded by mountains.
My curiosity got the better of me and I decided to use the Qubo Dash Cam Pro as an action camera and see how well it worked. I had mounted my Qubo dash cam on my handlebar and the vibrations resulted in horrible video footage. So I decided to mount it on top of my helmet. Since I didn’t want to replace the action camera mounting pad on my helmet with the Qubo one, I designed and 3D printed an adapter that secured the Qubo helmet mount to the action camera mounting pad. Maybe Hero Electronix should offer this as an accessory.
I recorded part of my morning ride and edited the footage in Adobe Premier Pro. I did a few things to the footage:
1) Replaced the audio with music. The wind noise recorded by the dash cam is just horrible.
2) Stabilized the footage using the Warp Stabilizer feature (Smoothness = 100%, Method = Position)
3) Color-graded the footage.
I couldn’t find a way in the Qubo app to disable the Qubo logo watermark and the time stamp at the bottom of the footage. The reason the logo and the watermark are shaking in the video is due to the stabilization which moves and crops the frames of the video to smoothen it out.
Watch the video and decide for yourself. As someone who has owned several GoPros in the past and has now switched to the DJI Omso Action, I will not use the Qubo Bike Cam Pro as an action camera. But that shouldn’t stop others from doing so.
I did find one positive though. Since the Qubo Bike Cam Pro records everything all the time, I could truly enjoy my morning ride uninterrupted instead of turning my action camera on and off all the time.