Review: Monoprice MHD Action Camera

Just last week, Monoprice announced its next-generation POV camera, the MHD Sport Wi-Fi Action Camera, which sells for $177, has a different design, and comes with built-in Wi-Fi capability. This camera we tested, the $100 MHD Action Camera, is still sold by Monoprice, and as you can see from our review, still makes a decent low-cost alternative — especially if you can go without the Wi-Fi features. Read the full review below.

Action cameras like the GoPro HERO3+ ($300-$400), Sony Action Cam with Wi-Fi($270), or Contour's Contour+2 ($350) have several things in common. They're compact, ruggedized, and easy to use. They're capable of capturing some pretty respectable HD video, and they can typically be paired with a wide enough array of mounting accessories to make them usable by most people to record their action activity of choice.

They're also wicked expensive. It's a bitter pill, especially when you consider that the conditions in which you're bound to use an action cam are exactly the kind of conditions in which you're most likely to destroy or lose the device. The scrappy folks at Monoprice think they have a solution — an action cam so affordable that seeing it chewed up by Mother Nature won't hurt nearly as much.

The MHD Action Camera costs only $100, but it's the real deal: a wearable, high-definition, 1920x1080p, 24-bit color camera capable of shooting 30 frames per second. Footage gets saved onto a standard microSD card up to 32GB in size. And if you want to jam more footage onto the card? No problem. Set up the camera to capture lower-resolution 1280x720p footage. Either way, the MHD offers a 120-degree field of view. So even if you're not pointing the thing in exactly the right direction, you're still liable to catch almost all of the action.

The MHD can take still shots too, but you likely won't want to use it for that purpose. It can only manage 5-megapixel still images. Most smartphones can snag better-quality shots than that.

To make sure your video has some audio to go along with it, the MHD comes packing a waterproof microphone. That's a win, especially since the hardware's housing is designed to be waterproof without a separate enclosure in up to 10 meters of water. Aquatic adventures await! To protect the MHD's guts from liquid death, Monoprice sealed the camera's ports behind a locking, water-tight cover. Underneath the cover, you'll find the MHD's microSD card slot, a Micro HDMI port for connecting the camera directly to a TV, and a mini-B USB port for charging the camera and transferring data over to a connected computer. All of this is contained inside a bullet-style body that weighs 3.9 ounces, and measures 1.9 inches tall, 0.75 inches long, and 1.5 inches wide.

The MHD is dead-simple to use. To record video, flick the camera's main switch — it's chunky enough to do so even if you're wearing gloves. Taking a still photo's just as easy, and you can expect to get about three hours out of a single charge. With the MHD's wide variety of optional brackets, adhesive pads and lashing straps, there's no shortage of ways to mount the camera on your person or vehicle.

Still, to meet its low price point, sacrifices had to be made. For one, there are no Wi-FI features, so it can't talk to your devices the way a GoPro can. The MHD's body may be water- and dust-resistant. But the plastic it's made of feels cheap, and it's not likely to survive a whole lot of abuse. Additionally, and perhaps more importantly, while it's capable of shooting 1080p HD video, the actual quality of that video left me underwhelmed. Footage I recorded on a long-distance bike ride turned out mediocre compared to what you'll get from GoPro and Sony cameras. Fast-moving objects looked blurred, and the footage in general seemed darker than it should have been. I wasn't thrilled by the color reproduction, either.

Of course, mediocre video from a camera that's so cheap you can almost afford to lose it is not that surprising. If you want higher-quality results, be prepared to pay a few — or several — hundred bucks more. But if you can live with "good enough" performance, the MHD is a steal.