Drift Stealth 2 review

Connecting the Stealth 2 to your smartphone is at least straightforward using Wi-Fi. Annoyingly, however, the camera will disable Wi-Fi when you turn it off, meaning you’ll need to dive into the menus to re-enable it each time you turn the camera on. This might be logical in terms of battery conservation, but we would have liked a quick-toggle option similar to the kind we’ve seen on recent GoPros.

Live view also stops as soon as you start recording video, meaning you can’t continue framing the shot using the app, although in fairness the inherent delay would make this difficult anyway.

There’s no way of adjusting the field of view from the default 135 degrees, meaning that footage always has a degree of barrel distortion. This gets you a better view of the action but sometimes it’s nice to have a more conventional perspective. The Stealth 2 also isn’t waterproof without a separate case, only water resistant, and one isn’t included. It costs around £25 and allows filming at depths of 40m.

Interestingly, the Stealth 2 can be used as a car dashcam. In car DVR mode recording starts whenever power is supplied through the Micro USB charging port, and you can adjust the recording interval between one and 15 minutes. Unfortunately a USB cigarette lighter adapter isn’t included.

Battery life was one of the Stealth 2’s strong points. It managed 2 hours 43 minutes shooting 1080p at 30fps, which is very good indeed. There’s also a Micro HDMI connection next to the micro USB charging port for connecting to a display.

VIDEO QUALITY

We mounted the Stealth 2 to our HPI Racing Bullet MT radio-controlled car and were generally pleased with its image quality. Still image performance wasn’t quite as sharp as other cameras we’ve tested around the same price, but in motion it provided a relatively stable image even under very difficult conditions. Shearing and wobble was well controlled and the camera’s sticky mount was rock-solid. Both a flat and curved sticky mount is included as well as a goggle mount.

CONCLUSION

Overall the Stealth 2 is a great entry-level action camera. While it lacks some of the extra controls we like from more expensive cameras, if you favour simplicity it covers all the basics. Battery life was also superb and image quality was also right on the money. The larger Garmin Virb Elite might add built-in GPS for £20 more, but it can’t compete in terms of battery life.