Top critical review
1.0 out of 5 starsPoorly executed camera with numerous faults. Recommendation: "do not buy."
Reviewed in the United States on October 7, 2023
This is a review of the motorcycle-specific bundle of the One RS camera. I found several flaws with the device in a one-day evaluation and elected to return it as unfit for purpose.
I am a motorcycle coach and use action cameras many times each week to film students on the racetrack. My program coaches around 450 student-days annually, and we use rider footage as a significant part of our instruction program, so I believe I’m fairly well qualified to review an action camera specifically sold as a motorcycle solution.
I found many issues with the camera solution, especially at this price point, and consider the camera so poorly researched for the motorcycle market, I suspect they just bundled some parts and put a motorcycle sticker on it without even trying the solutions in application.
The camera requires the end user to download a 600+ megabyte app to activate it. There is no way to use the camera in a standalone way without FIRST having some kind of tablet or phone device to activate it with a very large piece of software. Of course, in the locations motorcycles are often ridden, this kind of Internet bandwidth can be hard to come by, but it’s a ridiculous requirement in the first place for a device that otherwise could operate on its own just fine.
Next up, the packaging of the device includes any number of mounts, stickers and clamps that are made almost entirely of cheap plastic, and worse, have press fit metal pieces in the plastic for fasteners! On top of it all, there’s no elegant way to put a safety wire tether – a requirement for a lot of racetracks, and certainly a best practice anywhere you are dealing with motorcycles – on the camera. The GoPro style mount is plastic, an absolute failure point, and the ¼-20 threads on the mount pivot are press fit, and sure enough, started coming loose after just one session on track with the device.
The camera’s image quality is very poor. A GoPro 7 running in 720p produces a vastly better imagine quality than this camera running in 1080, and a much smaller file size as well! The image quality is grainy and looks a lot like the original 320 GoPro cameras from decades ago that ran on AAA batteries. Why not run 4k you ask? Well, what if you have two students that want a copy of the video you shot? Now you are looking at 2-3 *hours* of copy time between cards for a day’s video, when 1080p – if it were quality – is plenty good enough to show feet, body position, lean angle, etc.
The stabilization cannot be disabled at lower resolutions. This results in several problems with the video, but the most notable is the camera’s stabilization is not frame-stable. The camera will appear to zoom in and out (and this is clearly visible by parts of the chase-motorcycle dash coming in and out of frame during stabilization action), and this action causes significant visual distortion impacting the video quality and nature of the action being filmed. Things like lean angle and transitions are “softened” to the point it will appear the rider is going down the straight at a 30-degree angle when they were clearly straight up and down.
So, in total, you have a $500+ camera with poor image quality, shoddy mount hardware not fit for purpose that will absolutely fail very soon, tech requirements not realistic for the environment the camera is being marketed to, and a generally poor product. By comparison, the GoPro 11 Mini has relatively fewer faults, vastly better image quality, costs about half, and has replaceable, aluminum mounting.
This is a HARD DO NOT BUY recommendation for these reasons.
