Muvi Micro Camcorder and Extreme Sports Pack tested

If you want to film your in-car adventures, but don’t fancy strapping a cumbersome tripod or camcorder to your dash, the Muvi is the answer. It claims to be the smallest camcorder in the world -and we put it to the test with the company’s optional extreme sports pack.

It didn’t get off to the best of starts. We struggled to fit the micro SD memory card in the dedicated slot. What’s more, there is no display and only one light, which flashes according to what the unit is doing – initially, you need to refer to the manual to see if this means it’s recording.

Nevertheless, you get an impressive range of mounts, allowing us to fix the device to the steering wheel or rear view mirror, and even fix it to the dash with screws or Velcro. It features voice activation, so we could keep our hands on the wheel – it recognised a simple command such as “start record”. But we couldn’t get it to stop this way, and had to press the button.

Two USB cables are included for simple uploading – our PC treated the Muvi like a digital camera when transferring the .AVI files. But you only get VGA quality at this price, so footage wasn’t great on a big screen.

 * Problems? Micro SD card fiddly to instal, VGA resolution too poor for TV playback, excess straps.
 
 * So why buy? Easy to fit, plenty of mounts, doesn’t get in the way of driving, decent battery life.