Veho Muvi Pro Micro review

At about twice the height of a £2 coin, the diminutive Veho Muvi Micro certainly lives up to its name. The camera resembles a USB flash drive with a lens, and as standard just comes with a simple clip mount.

There’s also an inexpensive Extreme Sports Pack available (VCC-A001-ESP, £12 from http://cpc.farnell.com) that opens up your mounting options considerably, and comes with the usual helmet and adhesive mounts. At £47 including a 4GB microSD card, the Muvi Micro is one of the cheapest action cameras available, so it’s difficult to begrudge the lack of standard mounts. 

The camera’s specifications certainly do match its low price, however. The camera is only capable of capturing video at a paltry 640×480 resolution, which is a far cry from most other action cameras’ 1080p or higher. The field of view from the lens is also only 72^o, which is considerably narrower than the competition and will limit how much of the world the camera can take in.

The camera’s controls are very basic. On one side is a power switch, and on the other is a switch to turn on or off the sound-activated mode that starts video capture automatically when noise above 65dB is detected. There’s an exposed microSD card slot located below. You’ll need to be careful when ejecting a card as the strong spring is capable of pinging a card across the room. If you attempt to swap memory cards while outdoors, you have a fair chance of losing your microSD card if you’re not paying attention. A mini USB jack for charging and data transfer is on the bottom of the camera, and you’ll find the record button on the top.

As there’s no LCD display, you’ll need to connect the camera to a PC and install the Veho software to adjust settings. Video recorded on the Muvi Pro Micro is time and date-stamped on the footage, and we saw no way to turn this off, which was frustrating. You’ll also need to connect the camera to a PC and install the Veho software to change the time and date, which is annoying but at least you only need to do it once. You’ll need to make sure you have the VOX switch switched off, too, or your computer will detect the camera as a webcam. There’s also only a small multi-coloured LED to provide any sort of status indicator, so you’ll also need to remember what the various blinking notifications mean to make sure your camera is doing what you want it to.

Due to the lack of any included mounts, aside from the clip, we had to resort to packing tape to mount the camera to our test HPI Racing Bullet MT radio-controlled car. The resulting footage from both the static and speed run tests was poor, even taking into account the low resolution. Video lacked detail and foliage had a large amount of distracting purple fringing against the sky’s highlights. The camera doesn’t appear to have any image stabilisation, as our speed run footage was plagued with shearing and wobble.

^The Veho Muvi Pro Micro has a low-resolution sensor that made for poor quality footage 

The Veho Muvi Micro is inexpensive, but you’ll need to spend extra for the Extreme Sports Pack to use it for most sporting activities. Its small size and weight make it easy to put on and forget about. Along with its low cost, these are its only real positives, however. Its video quality is very poor, so it’s worth spending extra for either the Aiptek SportyCam Z3 or JVC GC-AX1 Adixxion, which both offer far superior video quality.