SJCAM M20 Action Camera Review

SJCAM M20 In Action

Now for the video recordings you’ve been waiting for, thoroughly recommend you set the video to its highest resolution:

So that we could make a direct comparison, both the GoPro Hero 4 and the SJCAM M20 were set at 1080 resolutions at 60fps, with all other settings at auto. The M20 had its in-built gyro function switched off for to enable a more true comparison.

When you compare the videos from the M20 to a GoPro Hero 4  you can see colors are more vividly represented with the M20. On a fairy bright day, the GoPro over-compensated with the exposure, and did not cope as well when transitioning to a less lit environment (when stepping on the ferry). You may notice that the M20’s lens has a slightly lesser focal length, hence objects when compared to the GoPro seemed a little more distant.

If you look very very closely at the comparison clip you’ll notice that although the M20 gets the exposure right, it compensates this by losing a little of the finer details. And of after review tests, we found that when the M20 is set to record at 4K, this hits the sweet spot in terms of detail and exposure.

The M20 handled low-light pretty well. The short clip shot in a covered overpass which was quite dimly lit, but M20 still managed to pick out all the details, except for the over-saturation when you look at the bright sunshine outside of the overpass.

With the in-built gyro on, hand held recording was much smoother. It did not eliminate all bumps, and no way does it compare to the stabilization you get if you used a gimbal, but the gyro does add a very satisfying degree of image stabilization. One thing to notice that is that with the in-built gyro on, fine details will blur a bit, such as the faces of the persons passing by and signage in the clip above. You’ll notice a few big bumps towards the end of the clip, and that was when I broke into a short quick sprint to see how the M20 would cope.

Sound Quality

The SJCAM M20 had a very balanced microphone, not only could it pick up the sounds from its immediate vicinity very well, background sounds were picked up without them being drowning the rest.

With the waterproof casing on, the microphone struggled to pick up the sounds, if you watch the gyro clip again, turn up the volume and you’ll just about hear the loud sounds of the vans driving past. In other action cameras, and previous generations of SJCAM ones, the waterproof casing would have an optional back cover which had openings in for the inbuilt microphone to pick up more sounds, but due to microphone being placed at the front of the M20, an entirely new casing would need to be developed.

Photo Images

The following photos were taken set in order of 16MP, 12MP, 10MP and 8MP, with gyro set to on, ISO at auto, and quality at Normal:

If you compared the photos in the increments of the MP settings, you would be hard pushed to find much difference, but if you just compare the 16MP photo taken with the 8MP one, you can see that with the 16MP photo you can pick out more smaller details such as the edges of the tree, and the traffic cone near the middle of the photo. Conditions at the time were beginning to become overcast, with the further background still in the sun, hence sharper edges for the skyline. If you zoomed in to the photos, you will see quite a lot of noise, but we are sure we can improve this further by manually setting the ISO setting rather than have it set at auto.

Color-wise, the photos stay quite true, but the most noticeable part of the photos is that of the lens distortion, especially the further away you move away from the centre of the photos.

When you enable the RAW setting, the M20 stores a separate RAW file to the photo you have taken, allowing you edit it to your hearts content later. At 16MP, a JPEG photos used around 2-3Mb, whilst the RAW image was around 25Mb in size.

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