AKASO EK7000 4K Ultra HD Action Camera

This is the second action camera I purchased. The first was a slightly cheaper (~$50), different brand, and it was awful. When I received the Akaso (~$70) I was very surprised at how much better it was than the cheaper alternative.

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PROS
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– The build quality is pretty great for its cost. It’s not perfect, but it’s very good for what you’re paying. The top-side button is a little sticky on mine, but otherwise the buttons are all tactile and responsive.
– Aesthetically (this won’t apply to everyone) I think this cam looks great. Matte black finish and some white text. Nothing too over the top and it just works for me. The finish isn’t perfect, and I’ve already had a bit of wear on the matte black paint and I’ve only used it for less than a week! This doesn’t concern my too much, though.
– Size and weight, this action cam is almost identical to a GoPro, other than a little thicker. Length and width is the same, with maybe a larger lens. Weight is very similar.
– The interface is pretty nice. The LCD screen isn’t the highest of quality, and does actually make the footage looks sub-par (more on quality of footage below), but it does the job fine. The start up splash screen looks nice and boots up pretty quickly. The GUI is very un-apologetically GoPro styled. Not much innovation in terms of changing the interface, but the GoPro interface is very nice, so why bother putting a lot of effort into changing it? Nice array of settings to change footage quality, set the date, turn on WiFi, etc.
– The footage quality (in my opinion) is very good. I compared the footage (and everything else) against a GoPro Hero4 and the cheaper action cam I mentioned above, and honestly the Akaso had the best quality of them all. Now, this is just my opinion and yours may differ, but I found the Akaso colours to be much richer. Sharpness of the video was on par with the GoPro. As mentioned above, the footage looks much worse on the LCD while recording, so don’t focus on that too much. Once you get it onto your computer it’s much better!
– The accessories this cam comes with are excellent. High quality plastic and don’t feel cheap. Crazy that the camera comes with all these accessories as well as a second battery and a dual battery charger. The remote control it comes with (although I’m not sure whenever I’d use it) is also very good.

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CONS
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– Battery life is a bit less than a GoPro. In my very limited testing I found a GoPro Hero4 at 1080p60 lasted around 1h40-1h50 minutes, whereas the Akaso lasted around 1h30. Considering that you get two batteries in this package and the GoPro only comes with one this isn’t much of a complaint.
– The Android application they suggest to use with the WiFi functionality of this camera is not very good. I don’t think the makers of this camera are affiliated with the application, so this isn’t a complaint to them, but something potential buyers should be aware of if that’s a big requirement to them (the WiFi feature, nor the application, were a necessity to me).
– The battery tray detaches from the camera, which is a petty thing to complain about, but can probably get lost easily. I understand why they did it though (cost).
– Once recording, there is no indication on the front of the camera, but there is a flashing red LED on the top, next to the start/stop button. This is convenient in that it exists, but may have been more beneficial being on the front.
– Stopping the footage once the screen has gone to sleep is a little temperamental, in that if you press the stop button it will wake the screen, and then I believe you have to press it again to actually stop the footage. The interface isn’t super snappy, so I’ve had a few situations where I’ve accidentally started a new clip while trying to stop the previous one. Also, you cannot seem to stop a new clip until a couple of seconds have passed. I’m sure I’ll get use to this though.
– You can set the date and time in the interface, which takes a bit of time, and that information is applied to the naming of the files on the SD card. However, that date/time is reset once you remove the battery, which you’ll probably be doing considering you have a spare available. This obviously makes sense, but a little annoying all the same. The date/time is automatically applied once you connect to the Android app, however, which is a nice touch, but I doubt I’ll be using the WiFi much.
– When you record for a long time it will split the video file into multiple files. This is the same as on a GoPro. However, on a GoPro it will create a matching naming structure to indicate they belong to the same recording clip (i.e. gopro01.mp4, gopro02.mp4). This isn’t the case with the Akaso, it will just create a new file with the date/time naming structure, same as any other clip (i.e. 20180204-100001.mov, 20180204-101203). This may be an issue if you have lots of clips on your card, as you’ll have to manually open every file and determine yourself which of the files are combined into the same recording.

I’ve listed a fair few cons here, but honestly, none of them are a big deal. They’re all perfectly understandable when you consider you’ve spent a quarter what you’d spend on a GoPro, and when ultimately it’s the footage which is (probably) the most important, this thing really takes a great video. Not really played with photos, but that’s not what I bought it for. Likewise, I don’t own anything 4K, so I’ve stuck with just 1080 content for the time being.

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Conclusion
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Great build quality. Great footage. Cheap price. Lots of accompanying accessories and batteries. Can’t complain at all.

I’m not impressed with this camera; “astonished” would be closer to the mark. Purchased this Akaso EK 7000 based on a recommendation from a friend of my wife’s, and I just can’t believe what this little camera can do for the money we put into it. As a caveat, we’re not pushing the camera to the limits of human endurance by skydiving, mountain biking, scuba diving or the like. But it works extremely well for our needs.
My wife competes in dog obedience training, and likes to review videos of her dog’s performance after trials and matches. Finding someone willing and capable to record her session in the ring on a cellphone is always difficult. Most of the other dog handlers are preoccupied with their dogs, and it’s not good ring etiquette to approach too close to the show ring to shoot video, since that will be a distraction. She noticed another handler retrieving a tiny camera from just outside the corner of the ring after her session and asked about it. Turned out to be this little EK 7000, and that handler was very enthusiastic about what it could do. When my wife asked for it for Christmas I was skeptical, so I spent a lot of time researching this and several other cameras. While there were other cameras that were able to do what the Akaso could do, and possibly even more, they were all at least two to three times as expensive. So I went ahead and gave this to my wife for Christmas.
We gave it a full practice run-through yesterday, mounting it on a short tripod at the corner of the ring. I used the 1080p 30fps setting instead of the 4K mode to get more storage space and lengthen battery life. Had the camera on for about an hour, shooting about a dozen videos of one to three minutes, plus a number of photos, and with wi-fi on for a while, and off for a while. I tried starting and stopping the camera manually, then used the phone app, and lastly used the remote for a while. All worked well, even from about 20 yards away. Back home I hooked up the camera to our 55-inch TV (via a micro-HDMI cable, not included), and we were both very pleased with the video quality. Since it’s a wide-angle lens, people (and dogs) are naturally pretty small at about 15 yards, but the high video quality means that when you put the video on a large screen you can still see all the details. The sound was a little muddy, but a huge overhead furnace was running right over the camera which made audio pickup difficult.
The battery lasted for at least two hours with the camera on, and was recording or playing back videos later for most of that time. The little charger will charge two batteries at a time, and seemed to need only an hour to take the battery from fully discharged to fully charged. (Lights on the charger progress from magenta to red to blue while charging.) You can also charge the battery just by connecting a USB cable to the camera, which we did while transferring files to the computer. I used four different video viewers on the our computer to watch the videos, and all showed the clips with no problem. Settled on VLC Media Player to access slow motion and other features.
There are so many attachment options included in the box that I can’t imagine you won’t be able to mount it any where you wanted. I used the frame with bottom and top threaded sockets to mount it to a regular camera tripod, and it worked great. The camera is so tiny that I’ve taken to putting it back into its waterproof case for additional protection before stowing it in the camera bag.
A couple notes: We installed the Akaso DV app on a Samsung Galaxy S5 cellphone. It worked almost perfectly, although at one point I changed modes at the same time I rotated the phone, and that, or some gremlin, locked up the app tight with a black screen. Force-stopped the app and restarted it, and had no further problems. The app itself is great, giving you the ability to start and stop the camera from a distance via a wi-fi connection, (be sure to disconnect the phone from any other wi-fi networks first), and actually see what the camera is recording live. While recording, the camera flashes a little red light on the top of the camera, but it’s not visible from anywhere but right above the camera. This means that when using the remote, if you don’t keep careful track of your button pushes, you may stop a recording already in progress when you meant to start one. The phone app shows you what the camera is doing, but running the wi-fi on the camera shortens the battery life somewhat, according to the manual. In the mode we were using, 1080p @ 30fps, the video was using about 106mb/minute. Unless my math is off, that means a 64gb card will store close to ten hours of high-quality video. One gotcha is that if you do change out the batteries, the camera forgets the date and time and you have to re-enter that if you want to tag your files accordingly, which is a bit of a hassle.
Would I recommend this camera to a friend? Absolutely. Would I buy it again? Only if we lose the little guy, a definite possibility with something so small. I’d better go write our name and phone number on it with a Sharpie right now!

I love it…. Simply the best…. worth the money….