Action Camera Buying Guide

The budget

Yeah, yeah. What else were you expecting? Like any other buying guide, this one starts with a budget in mind.

It is very important that you determine the amount of money you are willing to spend on an action cam. With a clear budget in mind you will filter out cameras that you can’t afford or the ones that are too cheap for you.

Trust me, you do not want to start a research without the budget. You’ll loose precious time looking at wrong models.

I understand. It’s not always that you can’t spend 500$ on an action camera. You might have the money. But you won’t use camera often, hence you just think it wouldn’t be money well spent. And that’s perfectly fine.

From financial and pricing aspect, there are 4 groups of action cameras on:

• Extremely tight budget <50$
• Tight budget 50-100$
• Mid-range budget 100-200$
• High-end budget 200$+

Extremely tight and tight budget

Even if  you have plenty of cash to spend, my personal recommendation for newbies is to start small. For up to 100$ you can find bunch of cameras that will help you understand what is an action camera, how it works and things you can do and can’t do with it.

Mid-range budget and higher-end

In my personal experience, once you get your first cheap camera, you will soon break it or realize there is a feature you really want and it does not offer it. Of course there are people who bought a cheap camera and it works, does the job well, so they have no need to invest further.

After their first encounter with action cameras, some users realize their first camera works well, they barely use it, and when they use it it provides decent results and meets their expectations and needs.

The other part breaks their camera, starts swearing the technology and starts talking about good old days when all products were mechanical.

Higher end action cameras

The third part of users are people ready to move forward. They familiarized themselves with a concept of an action camera. They bought their first one that was a good experience, but they want to take their videos to the next level.

Those users are considered an experienced action camera users and provided that they have the financial possibility they usually go for a more expensive cameras.

Depending on your financial status, determine the maximum amount of money you are willing to spend on your first or the next action camera.

Okay, assuming that you determined your budget. We can move to another important factor – video quality.