There’s a battle going on in the mountain bike video recording market, and squaring up in the blue corner is the diminutive HD Helmet Hero camera from GoPro.

Filming your ride isn’t anything new; many of us have been doing it for years. But now that technology has advanced to the point that the hardware can be small, light and unobtrusive enough to use every time you hit the trails, along with quality that will blow you away. The  rise of video sharing websites (like Mpora) has helped with the popularity of sharing your fave rides.

GoPro’s HD Hero is the company’s newest offering, and is a compact camera concealed in an all-weather and shockproof polycarbonate housing, so mud and rain won’t bring it quickly to a grinding halt. Despite its size it films in both full high definition 1080p and a less memory intensive 720p (30fps at 1080p and 60 at 720).

The camera uses a 1,100mAh rechargeable battery and battery life is 2.5 hours. There aren’t many buttons to master, just a shutter button to start recording and one for changing between the different modes. A small LCD panel displays information such as battery life and what video mode you’re in, and how many recordings you’ve made.

There’s no memory card included, which is a shame considering you’ve just laid out £299.99 for the camera in the first place. A quick look on Google reveals suitable SD memory cards don’t cost too much however, and large capacity cards are pretty cheap. With a minute of 1080p video taking up 100mb, opt for a decent size card.

A miniUSB port for transferring your Spielberg creations to computer for editing and uploading, and it also charges the internal battery. Inside the box is a helmet mount kit for vented helmets and two curved and two flat mounts with adhesive backings.

We’ve also got the chest mount, a harness that allows the camera to be mounted on the chest for a really interesting camera angle – lower than a helmet camera and captures the handlebars to you get a better sense of what the rider is doing. The chest is also more isolated from vibration than your lid too.

It’s an odd, funky look camera. It won’t win any awards from the design community but its compact size, wide range of mounts and quality video recording are winning most over. We’ll be hitting the trails soon so watch out for some home video action on Bikemagic soon.

Available from www.madison.co.uk costing £299.99.

Got one? Let us know what you think in this forum thread.