I’ve been using a Drift Ghost X as a helmet-mounted safety/evidence camera for about a year and a half. I bought mine from J&S accessories - the current price is about £130, and it comes with a quick-release mount, and two receptacles for the mount (one flat, one curved, to fit different surfaces) with adhesive pads.

I chose the GhostX because it’s smaller and a bit cheaper than GoPro’s cameras, but is decent quality (there’s some really cheap rubbish out there). The Ghost X is a small, lightweight camera with an IPX4 rating, meaning it’s sufficiently water-resistant to be used in rainy weather. It produces 1080p footage at up to 30 frames per second, with an optional timestamp overlay, and has around 5 hours of battery life. There’s also an XL version, which I think is the same camera with a larger battery (9 hours), and the Ghost 4k. For my purposes, I think the 4k would be overkill: it’s 3 or 4 times the price, and the 4k files would be huge. 1080p is perfectly adequate for recording incident details: the limiting factor is generally not pixel density, but light levels and motion blur; the smaller pixels on 4k sensor may actually exacerbate low-light problems, as the same light is spread across more pixels, degrading signal-to-noise.

The camera can be set to record all the time, but then post-processing is required to extract any incidents from a recording of the entire ride (AVIDemux is a free software tool that does this well). Alternatively, the camera can save a file at intervals of 30 seconds, or 1, 2, 5 or 10 minutes. This means there’s less post-processing to be done, but I found there was a delay of several seconds between the end of one file and the beginning of the next, which means that critical information may be missed. It’s possible this is due to the storage card, rather than the camera, but I’m using class 10 card, so I wouldn’t expect it to be a problem.

I now mostly use the camera in ‘video tagging’ mode - it’s on all the time, recording and buffering video, but doesn’t save anything until you press a button. Once the button’s pressed, it saves the previous 2 minutes of footage, keeps recording and saving for another 2 minutes, and you can extend this by pressing the button again. This greatly reduces the need for post-processing, and means I can go longer between clearing out the SD card.

All the settings can be set using the buttons on the camera, but this takes a bit of getting used to. You can also link it to your phone via WiFi, and configure and control it using an app. The app is intuitive and easy to use.

I’ve only had one problem with the camera that required action from Drift, and they were great. The first time I took the camera out in the rain, there was some fogging behind the front glass element due to a tiny hole in the seal. I contact Drift, and they immediately sent out replacement parts and instructions on how to fit them, and it has not been a problem since, in 18 months of use.

Other issues are very minor, and either easy to resolve or so minor that they can be overlooked.

• USB contact problems during data transfers can cause the camera to lock up, but there’s a reset switch to sort this out. After a reset, the camera seems to remember most of its state, except the date and time, which need to be set again if you want to use timestamps.
• When using the Android app, if the ‘phone switches the screen of, it is sometimes necessary to close the app, reopen it, then reconnect to the camera.
• The part of the quick-release mount that connects to the camera has recently begun to fail, but I really can’t complain: it’s had 18 months of almost daily use. Replacements cost about a tenner.
• Video tagging mode always re-enables thumbnails, so you end up with a full-size video and a thumbnail copy, whether or not you want the thumbnail. I believe Drift are aware of this, so there’s a good chance it gets resolved in a future firmware update.