RC Plane Camera On Kites

by dr
(Belgium)

Q:

Have you heard about aerial photography made with an RC Kite from Premier? Possible or not?

A:

It certainly is possible, using an RC plane camera! Lots of people these days are curious about trying to take photos from RC planes, helicopters and kites. Manufacturers are responding in 2 ways...

1) Read-to-go aerial photography solutions. In other words, flying craft with the camera built-in and
2) Very lightweight cameras specifically designed to be taken up by an RC flyer of some kind!

You are interested in the second option, and there seems to be an excellent RC Plane Camera product manufactured in ... where else ... China. Just visit my KAP page on this site, if you want to see some examples. Scroll down a bit to view the eBay listing.

I can tell you a thing or 2 about this device right now...

• Records 640 x 480 video at 25 frames per second.
• Captures photos at 1280 x 960 pixels (about the same as your computer screen!)
• Has 2GB internal storage memory.
• A USB 2.0 connection lets you dump all the imagery onto your computer.
• Compatible with Windows XP, Vista, Seven, Mac OSX and Linux operating systems.
• It's size is 82 mm x 28 mm. For our U.S. friends, that's 3 1/4" long and just over 1" wide.

You can change the photo capture interval from once every 15 seconds up to once every 300 seconds. I imagine it would take a long time to fill up the memory card at that rate!

Finally...

Believe it or not, there is also a wireless video camera on the market which weighs a mere 9 grams (a fraction of an ounce)! It's called the Eyecam 2.4GHz Color Micro Wireless Video Camera, if you want to look it up. At $250, it's not cheap, and currently might be hard to get outside the US.