K-Edge are warning K-Edge XL Combo mounts to not be used with the Fly12. I had one of the original designs snap on me. As the Cycliq supplied handlebar mount is useless (does not position the camera out the front or in the middle) I now have a serious problem. I am trying to find an alternate but it looks as though I will have to use two K-Edge mounts, one for the Garmin and one for the Fly12.
TL;DR
buggy, heavy and expensive but solidly built and worth purchasing.
As a
cyclist who has tried a lot of cameras, given a lot of footage to police to
report close shaves and near accidents, I was intrigued with the Fly12. I have tried
other cameras but have always come back to the GoPro. Recently one of my GoPros
died, so I looked at the Fly12. My first shock was the price. You can buy a
GoPro 5 Black for the same price. (10/01/2017 Fly12 - cycliq.com.au AUD$499 and
GoPro5 Black - digitalcamerawarehouse.com.au AUD$498). However the reported
long life of the battery (claimed up to 10 hours of recording) swayed me. So I
purchased it (from Pushys on special for $479). I purchased the SanDisk 64GB
Ultra MicroSDXC Memory Card from Officeworks. Currently (22/02/2017) they are AUD$29.99.
To me, anything less than a 64GB card in a camera is not sufficient. The Fly12 comes with a 16GB memory card.
Once I
received the camera, I had to do a double take. It is a lot bigger than I expected
it to be. It is also quite heavy (244g) but fantastic quality in the build. Having
the light built into the camera frees up handlebar real estate so you’ll
forgive the weight.
It comes
with an assortment of accessories such as cables, a lanyard and a mount. I
would strongly suggest using an XL K-Edge combo instead. Even if you do not
have a Garmin 1000, you’ll need the space as this camera pushes your cables.
Charging
the Fly12, do not charge the Fly12 from
your computer. It takes about 20 hours to charge. Use a universal USB power
point charger (not supplied). Any of them will do. This cuts the charge time
down to a few hours if fully flat. Take note, look carefully at the microUSB
port and you’ll see the charge light. Red for charging and green for fully
charged. I first assumed the LED on top of the camera also related to charging.
Not the case. As a side note, if you mount the Fly12 on a K-Edge type
Garmin/GoPro mount, the LED is on the bottom so you have no notifications as to
whether the camera is working or not, more on that later.
So, you
have it mounted, charged and want to go for a ride. Well, if you are using the
default settings (which are pretty good settings), just press the power button
in and wait for the power on chime and then let the power button go. If at any
stage you want to change which light setting is being used (solid, pulsing and
flashing and brightness variants of each) just a quick press on the power button
and the light setting will change. Now this sounds easy but I refer you back to
the photo of how close the back of the Fly12 is tucked into the cables. Not so
easy. As the power and wifi buttons are both black, remembering which is which
takes a while, since you can’t see them anyway.
So what is
the footage like? The footage is really crisp and you can easily see
registration plates on cars. A must for a safety camera on a bike.
The ability
to overlay “tram lines” is a must for a safety camera. The main complaint
I consistently get from police when I send in footage with my statements regarding
an incident is how can they easily tell a lawyer whether a car is less than a metre or not? You
can set the distance to 1m or 1.5m (about 3 foot or 5 foot). It works really
well. However, you can only apply tramlines if you use the Cycliq Plus
smartphone app (available for Android and iPhone).
Notice the
registration plate on the parked car? The footage really does enhance rego
plates nicely. The car on the left is parked and the truck is passing me. The
tram lines clearly show the driver has given me sufficient room. I have the
tram lines set to 1 metre.
A note about
the app. Firstly, it takes some getting used to. There is a vast amount of
configuring you can do, you can also review footage, connect it to Strava and
use overlays (which work brilliantly) and a number of other things. The one
thing you should not do, even though you can, is to start recording from the
app. All sorts of problems ensue however I believe this is due to the bugs you
will discover. I do not know why but this camera has been out for quite a while
now yet it is still prone to bugs. By this I mean the camera does strange
things including configuration corruption, not powering off properly and not
able to connect via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. You will very quickly get used to the
Master Reset button. A configuration text file is kept on the memory card and
with a reset it wipes everything in memory (not the contents of the memory
card) and reconfigures the Fly12 after reading in the text file with your preferred settings. The reason I
have taken so long to write this review is the amount of times I have had to
use the reset button. The first time I had to use it, the camera ran flat and would
not charge at all until the reset was performed. The second time I had to do
it, the camera decided to go into “race mode” (all LEDs disabled) without any
changes made by me. I had simply tried to power it off. Instead, the next morning I picked the Fly12
up to go riding, it was unusually warm and wouldn’t power on. A reset fixed it,
of course I had to recharge it and could not use it on my ride that morning.
Other times I have had to use the reset button as I could not connect via Bluetooth
or Wi-Fi to the camera.
However, here is a major bugbear of
mine. If you are going to place a small hole to place something in to reset a
device, for the love of every deity, make it big enough to fit a paperclip in the hole. I
ended up using the clip which comes with iPhones to remove a SIM as a
straightened paperclip would not fit.
So some
more of my complaints about the Fly12:
- Everyone talks about the lack of LED to indicate the camera is recording. I agree. Having to use your smartphone to check it is recording is ridiculous and dangerous. I understand the reasons but do not agree with them.
- No idea what level your battery charge is at, not even on the app.
- Surely the app should have the ability to turn on and off the light?
- With the light flashing (not pulsing or on full), you only get 6 hrs 40 mins of battery life. This sounds a lot but when the claim on the box is 10 hours, it is disappointing. With the light on pulse, I only got just over 4 hours of battery life.
- From the manual: "Capture/Incident protection: If you witness an event that you want to capture and retain when riding, simply press the WiFi button briefly. This will lock the current and previous file and prevent overwriting." Again, I refer you to the photo of the Fly12 mounted with the cables against the back of it. Not well thought out.
Overall
though, I really quite like the Fly12 and would be happy to suggest purchasing
it over a GoPro. Unless of course GoPro reverses its decision and once again
allows third party external batteries like the Brunton All Day external
battery.
