New Camera Mount

 

 Camera Equipment on our boat.

With nine months of Pandemic semi isolation under our belt, we're trying to expand our world access and that means trying to get out on the boat more often. That means we'll have more chances to record video and take more sailing photographs.

Peggy has a nice Nikon D3100 SLR and takes great photos, I'm trying to encourage her to take more. I 
have an Olympus Camera, not as fancy but it takes good photos and videos. 3rd Camera (not including our phones and tablet) is an Akaso Brave 4 4K action camera with a load of accessories to enable securing it to the boat or boat hook (for under water hull inspections).

I've been looking for a 2nd action camera as, sometimes, it's good to have a camera looking aft as well as our normal camera looking forwards.

I'm guessing that my amazon searches were the cause that I received an offer from LSJX to review their bike mount for GoPro and Phones.

I ordered the Bike mount and it arrived the next day. Gotta love Amazon Prime!

Over the past couple of years, I've had several phone mounts and camera mounts. Most of them have failed within a month and I'm not a brutal user. When I saw that this mount was mostly plastic, my expectations dropped. However, upon receipt that changed. The segment that clamps to a tube (bike handlebar or boat rail/bimini tube etc.) is not a cheapo plastic, it's sturdy! To test it, I clamped it to my desk top, that worked solidly, clamped it to my workshop bench top which is pretty thin sheet steel, same again, solid! So the clamp stand up and looks like it will hold in place, however I'll still secure it with a wire tie as boats tend to vibrate when under power, especially a 3 pot diesel engine sailboat.

The mount can hold a phone and action camera at the same time. One very pleasant aspect of this mount is the thumb screw of the camera mount - look how long it is compared to a regular screw, so much easier to attach the camera. (The lower screw is from my camera mount. The, longer, screw comes with this bike mount.

More good news, the attachment is standard, so many of the existing accessories I have for my action camera fit which significantly expands the mounting options using this mount. 

Now for the phone attachment, the picture shows it clamping the sides of the phone, the rubber like bands really hold the phone in place and their position does not interfere with the phone side buttons. It's a bit of an effort to detach the phone once attached, but I see that as a plus. The phone attachment can be quickly released from the mount by just squeezing the two side pushes of the adapter, the good part about that is the phone with mount adapter also fits several of my action camera mount adapters. My existing camera mount does not have a suitable method of attaching a phone, so this is a big plus for this mount.

Just to show how wide this bike's clamp opens, here is the mount on the box in which it arrived.

The clamp closes up to almost nothing and has rubber inserts on both of the clamping surfaces. The adjusting screw (on the right in this pic) can be spun easily once pressure on the clamps is released making it very quick to open or close the clamp to fit different diameter tubes.

I'll definitely keep this mount and I'll give it a 5 star review on amazon.

See you on the water (and maybe you'll be in some of our photos.)

Paul