Both these cameras have a bullet/lipstick package style. This allows them to be easily mounted (taped) to fixtures such as booms, paddles and sail heads. The rationale with these cameras is practicality and easy of use in the field, rather than video quality. In the application of windsurfing, a bead of water, or oil from sunscreen will turn a high end camera into a $19 jobbie. If you're priority is footage, then I guess you will manage this problem. However, If your like me, filming is an after thought. If the session is good and I have had my sail, then the camera is stuck on to capture the last half of the session. I don't check on it. I treat it as 'fire and forget'. That's how I film. So, the above argument applies to me. I want something simple to use and oblivious.
Contour Roam2 is manufactured by the defunct company Contour. Although, these units are still for sale on the Internets. These cameras are a fixed 170 degree wide angle camera. However, the camera head (substrate) can be rotated as needed. These cameras are configurable by editing a text file, which you can more or less leave alone. The only thing I changed, is to set the camera to PAL (25hz refresh rate) for Australian screen compatibility and longer record time. To film: “Slide.. lock”. Basic. These cameras only have a water depth rating of about 0.5m, so keep that in mind if you tape it to the top of a sail. I have had these units briefly submerged in more an a metre of water and never had a problem with water egress. The audio sound quality is excellent. Excellent response over the usable 10khz (or so) bandwidth range. Filtering can be applied by covering the microphone hole with some tape, or filtering the audio with a high order software notch filter (PM me if you would like more details on how to do this). It's a very heavy camera. It's also gets very hot.
I purchased the Replay-XD 1080 Minis for 3D video. These are one of the few action cams on the market with natural field of view. A wide angle lens distorts view, diminishes the 3D illusion and makes things look far away. This camera being a natural view angle has none of these bad points. It's application is for target shooting/hunting etc. It is easy to use (similar to the Contour) – press a button and it powers and starts recording (Note: this requires configuration – not default behaviour). It has an internal vibrator to indicate power on and record so there's no wondering if it's recording in times of noisy conditions. These cameras also are configured with a text file similar to Contour. However, the sound is crappy for windsurfing application. Even with tape and filtering. The natural angle view makes the view jump around too much to be useful. It was so bad, I never bothered converting any of my sailing footage from these cameras to 3D (the original intent). However, this natural angle view is excellent from a fixed position (ie: at the water's edge or out the back dismounted). This camera also has a wide angle mode, which is switch selectable (ie: 1080 - 720 switch on the picture above). I have not used this mode, so can not comment. This is a very small and light camera. The maximum depth is 3 metres. Note: At the time of this writing, these cameras have dropped over half price.
Video quality: I'll let you be the judge of that (see below). This video was snapped using the cameras mentioned above. For contour footage, you'll see my white helmet on the right. When this helmet is not seen, then the footage is from the ReplayXD's. Nb/ The ReplayXD 1080 Mini encodes into a very large screen dimension in H264.
