NOISE PLAY 2 INTRODUCING 16MP SPORTS CAMERA ACTION, LATEST TECHNOLOGY





Noise Play 2 design


The Noise Play 2 ships in a much smaller box than its predecessor did, and that’s primarily because you don’t get any of the accessories with it. In the box, you get only a charging cable, manual, warranty card, and the battery.




Noise Play 2 action camera comes in a stylish black cardboard box/case. Insidethe box, the camera and its USB charger come safely enclosed within a black protective foam. A quick start guide is included in the box. The camera is cuboidal in shape with its camera lens present on the top left side on its front. It comes witha 5.08 cm touchscreen LCD display on its back-side. There is a built-in microphone that supports External Mic. Built-in Wi-Fi and speakers are also there.
There are 4 LEDs on the camera- one at the top near the shutter button (Top LED), two obliquely parallel LEDs in the front alongside the lens (Front LED 1 and 2), and one at the back in the topmost left corner (Back LED).

The camera has only two buttons now, since the rear 2-inch display supports touch input. The downside to this is that you can't interact with the menus when the camera is inside its housing. The buttons have good tactile response. There’s a provision for a tripod mount on the bottom, which we like. You get three red LEDs, which are placed around the camera, however the one above the display isn’t very bright and is tough to see in daylight.
The Noise Play 2 boasts of a 16-megapixel sensor with an f/2.8 aperture wide-angle lens. There’s a removable 1200mAh battery, which is slightly larger than the one offered before. The Noise Play isn’t waterproof, so you’ll need to use the optional housing which lets you take it to depths of 30m. It supports 4K video recording at up to 30fps in NTSC mode. There’s also burst shooting, WDR (wide dynamic range) for videos, slow motion, and the ability to manually set various exposure parameters such as sharpness, white balance, metering, colour, contrast, etc.



Performance



The first step is to charge the action cam battery with the help of the USB charger provided along with other accessories. You could charge the battery by connecting the camera to a computer or other USB charging adapter using the included USB cable. If you are going to charge using a wall charger then wall chargers marked: output 5V 1A are recommended. We used a laptop to charge the battery.


When you plug in the USB cable to charge the battery, the back led starts blinking, the touch screen comes alive with the Play II logo and a sound alert, and you get two options to choose from- 1) Mass Storage and 2) PC Camera.


If you select 'PC Camera", a setup will run on your computer while the action cam screen will turn blue with 'PC Camera" displayed on the screen and the top and back LEDs will stay on.

Verdict

The Noise Play 2 improves upon its predecessor in certain areas such as build quality and battery life. It also gets a touchscreen and some of the video quality issues of the previous version have been addressed. However, it also takes a few steps backwards. The narrow aperture isn't of much use in low light. The decision to go with a proprietary USB port instead of Micro-USB or even Type-C is strange, and means that you need to be very careful with the included cable. We’re also not big fans of the exposed ports and slot. On top of all that, the bundle is also pretty sparse now


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