08.29
Since a few days I’m the owner of a Toshiba Camileo BW10 pocket camcorder. It’s a very small FullHD (1080p30) watertight camcorder. The watertightness is one feature that sets the BW10 apart from it’s competition, especially at it’s particular price point (one can be had for ~140EUR).
Video
The BW10 produces 1080p video at a 30fps framerate, encoded as H264 (AVC). Please note the BW10 does real 1920×1080 instead of 1440×1080 (anamorphic) video, so it’s true FullHD. It encodes between 13-15MBit/sec.
Now that all sounds fine and dandy, however, the BW10 seems to not deal very well with full screen motion, the recorded visual quality significantly drops when the camera is heavily shook, or the larger part of the screen is in continual motion. However when recording in 720p, it does deal pretty well with full screen motion. I guess Toshiba limited the maximum bitrate to 16mbit (SDHC class 2), no matter which kind of card you use, so all cards are compatible, but 16mbit probably doesn’t provide enough headroom to do 1080p with full screen motion.
Because the BW10 is very very light, it is hard to keep it steady at times, and although it has a digital stabilizer, which does seem to work, it can’t work miracles. So I’m considering purchasing a monopod to use as a simple stabilizer. You can obviously take this as far as you want.
Last and least, true to it’s class, it performs poorly in low light conditions, just like all other (more expensive but still) affordable camcorders.
Photo
The BW10′s photo capabilities are horrible and then some less. Some rocket scientist at Toshiba thought it to be a good idea to oversharpen the hell out of everything to the point it produces artifacts. This is obviously a firmware issue, so this could be fixed with a future firmware update, if Toshiba decides to grace us with one.
If Toshiba graces us with a fix, I reckon it’s photo quality could be similar to the better phone camera’s.
Update: when you set the photo camera feature to only to 2MPixel shots, the resulting images are quite decent. I wouldn’t be surprised if the actual sensor is only 2MPixel (which is enough for 1080p) and upscales to the advertised 5MPixel.
Webcam
Funnily enough the BW10 can also function as a Webcam (640×480), which is nice, but not really that special. They did implement this well, it’s USB Video Class, so it’ll work with any modern operation system, without any driver installation woes.
USB Connection
At first glance I foolishly mistook the BW10′s Micro USB plug for a proprietary one. After some reading up, it seems phone manufacturers settled on Micro USB for charging via USB, and it’s great Toshiba went with that. Thumbs up for Toshiba.
Battery
The BW10′s battery is not a sealed internally as part of the unit, so in theory you could buy extra batteries for extended operation. Toshiba lists 70 minute operation for a fully charged battery, while charging an empty battery can take up to three hours. I’ve been able to get 75 minutes of FullHD continous video when shooting directly after charging. Not a particular real-world use-case. I guess it’ll be realistic to expect an hours worth of FullHD video from a single battery with real-life usage.
Notes
Some other things that are nice about the BW10 is the pouch Toshiba includes with the camcorder, it won’t protect the unit from shock damage, but it will protect it from getting scratched by your keys when you have it in your pocket. For serious protection a real pouch like Lowepro’s Apex series will be better.
Toshiba also had the insight to fit the BW10 with a standard screw in mount so the BW10 can be used with a generic tripod or monopod.
Conclusion
All in all the BW10 is far from perfect, not forgetting it’s faults, I’d still say it’s a bargain. Especially considering that most competing products in it’s price class have similar deficits.
