Review: TomTom Bandit Camera

By Barney

This is TomTom’s entry into the hotly contested action-cam arena, resplendent with a distinctive shape and several unique features, including many built-in sensors that variously gauge speed, G-force, altitude and rotation.

The app accompanying the camera uses this information to pluck out exciting bits of whatever you shoot, and streams them one after the other. Just shake the app and it creates a little movie (or a ‘sick edit’, if you’re 12). Drop in the soundtrack of your choice – well, whatever tunes are on your phone – and upload the whole shebang to the internet.

The Bandit is a broadly cylindrical device, 9.5cm long with a large ‘on’ button on the back, a small control screen and a four-way touchpad on top, along with the ‘stop’ button. The very clever spring-loaded attachment system can rotate to orient the camera along its own axis – for example you can mount your camera sideways on the side of your helmet  and rotate the camera so the video is still landscape. It’s very neat.

At the time of review, the Bandit was available in two versions, ‘basic’ and ‘premium’; the only difference is the accessories – there are many more adjustment options with the ‘premium’ set-up. With our basic kit, the easiest way to get started was helmet-mounting. After we went to print, a bike edition (with helmet mounts and a bar mount) also became available. You can buy helmet mounts separately, too.

The smartphone app has a near-instantaneous video feed, so it’s easy to ensure the camera is in the right place – although once you’ve stuck the mount down, there’s no budging it, and there’s no adjustment either, apart from the mount which lets the camera rotate around its own axis.

Starting is easy – press the on button, which you can feel with gloves on, and a rising series of tones announces recording has started. To stop, press the button on top to elicit a falling series of tones. Leave it long enough and it’ll go to sleep, ready to be woken by your questing fingers.

After you’ve recorded yourself shredding (or whatever), it takes seconds to link camera to phone, which performs its shakey-shake magic, and easily lets you upload your newly created masterpiece to ‘sickedits.com’ or wherever. The phone software is certainly clever, and it’s obviously faster than wading through footage on a laptop, though it doesn’t always get the bits you want on its own (you can mark them, though) – and often gets bits you don’t want. I got a long segment of me repairing a puncture, and it adores road sections (as they’re so very fast). To be fair, it’s easy to get rid of those in the app too, but it’s a bit more fiddly than you’d perhaps hope. And the app does do a fairly good job of picking up interesting bits, and encouragingly they’re refining the software all the time.

Video quality is excellent – it’ll shoot up to 4K resolution at 30fps, and a variety of lower resolutions at increasing fps, although like so many cameras, helmet mounting is always a compromise – if you angle it to see the horizon, you can barely see the bike – and thus have little context. And if you angle the camera down you get the bike, but not much else. It’s tricky to manage, especially with the lack of adjustment afforded by the ‘basic’ kit – the ‘premier’ kit (or the ‘bike kit’, natch) seems like much the better buy from a bike-functionality point of view.

The shape also means there’s no chest mount available, although TomTom say they’re working on a shoulder mount, to be available soon. At 192g, it’s 50g or so heavier than the GoPro Hero4, and, depending on where you put the camera, this heft is more or less noticeable. And the last downside is wind noise, which is very loud indeed when the speed picks up, but we’ve just been told you can now record sound with an optional microphone cable accessory, which may help.

Overall: A valiant effort from TomTom, with some excellent visuals and really nice design touches. But the weight (particularly as a helmet camera) and wind noise do hold it back somewhat. Oh, and if you want maximum versatility, you’ll need the ‘premier’ kit.

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Barney Marsh

Barney Marsh takes the word ‘career’ literally, veering wildly across the road of his life, as thoroughly in control as a goldfish on the dashboard of a motorhome. He’s been, with varying degrees of success, a scientist, teacher, shop assistant, binman and, for one memorable day, a hospital laundry worker. These days, he’s a dad, husband, guitarist, and writer, also with varying degrees of success. He sometimes takes photographs. Some of them are acceptable. Occasionally he rides bikes to cast the rest of his life into sharp relief. Or just to ride through puddles. Sometimes he writes about them. Bikes, not puddles. He is a writer of rongs, a stealer of souls and a polisher of turds. He isn’t nearly as clever or as funny as he thinks he is.

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