Used camcorder advice please

I have a plan to capture really high quality biking footage. I’ve done filming with good helmet cam setups but these aren’t great quality and you still need to carry some form of recorder (usually a camcorder) in your bag.

I was thinking a cheap small used camcorder strapped to the side of a full face crash helmet would work very well. I have old abused MX lids I can use for the purpose.

Is this totally daft or a good idea? Are camcorder auto focus systems capable of working at speed?

Any help or advice what models to look at would be much appreciated. Due to the risk of damage I’m looking to spend a maximum of £100. In return I’ll post up any footage for the stw masses to judge/insult!

I reckon it’ll shake too much (too many moving parts in it)

See if you can get one with an external camera interface and a bullet cam to plug into it

Wouldn’t a solid state recorder work ok? Also being mounted to my head won’t rattle it half as much as attached to a bike.

We’ve a JVC camcorder that records onto SDHC cards. Will fit 3.5hrs of DVD quality film onto a 16gb card. Was about £120. Its very light. I reckon you could fashion up a bracket & use the tripod mount underneath. Quite tempted to try mine but the Mrs would kill me.

To mount I plan to attach a ‘helmet’ shaped piece of wood to the camera itself and then Velcro them together.

Autofocus wouldn’t, if you ask me. They’re usually pretty damn slow and when they go out of focus for a second they get totally baffled. Unless you can lock one at infinity, but that defeats the purpose in a way.

How do the headcam units focus?

David, have a look at the videos on this guys site to determine whether a helmet mounted camera is the way to go, theres a few links to useful american forums too.

http://www.mountainbikebill.com

The later recorded ones are using an HD setup and though a bit outside your budget he is quite forthright in his views on the shortcomings of various systems. Good vids to save as well.