Silverlit Spycam Coaxial Helicopter

There is a place at the end of my street, called The Aniti Gravity Shop, that sells kites, skateboards and a few RC planes and helicopters, not the sort of place I go to that often as a serious RC flyer but I do pop in now and again as I walk past it almost every day.

Anyway, I found this Silverlit helicopter in there a few weeks ago that comes with an on board camera. I bought quite a few little Silverlit helicopters last winter as they are very good, easy to fly and pretty well built, and would have bought this one right away before I'd discovered quadcopters and hexacopters etc and proper aerial photography.

However, it had been raining for days and days a week or so ago and my mind went back the the Silverlit Spycam helicopter I'd seen in the shop down the street and I thought to myself, just because I'm not going to use it for aerial photgraphy doesn't mean I can't have a bit of fun flying about inside churches (there are lots of them in York) when the weather is bad and seeing what the videos come out like and, after all, there's bound to be others out there who are curious as to what the video might look like too.

So here we have it, I went out and bought one and I flew it around inside two chruches with my acolyte, Kevin, filming and the on board camera also getting its point of view.

I have to say for the price it's not that bad, in fact if I'd waited and got it from Amazon it would have been even better - www.anti-gravity.co.uk = £70, Amazon UK = £49.

The Silverlit Spycam coaxial heli flies very nicely, perfect for a beginner and great for messing around taking photos or videos. It comes with a radio that has two triggers on it, one for taking pictures and one for starting and stopping video recording. The only disappointing thing for me really was that the video record time isn't very long and there's no way to get to an SD card to put a bigger one in. For our 'church shoot' I took a laptop with us to download the on board footage and free up space to film the next bit - three times in all for the video below.

You will also notice that I take my hands off the controlls near the end to demonstrate how it hovers very nicely on its own, but you can't actually do that 'out of the box' because the throttle has a spring on it. I opened mine up and took the spring off.

This is a nice little 3 channel (i.e. up-down, forwards-backwards, yaw-left yaw-right) indoor coaxial helicopter, very stable and quick for anyone to learn how to fly. It is infra red rather than radio controlled, so it really is only suitable for indoors. You can fly outside if there is no wind, but you won't get far before it drops from the air because the infra red signal just disperses outside with no walls to bounce off of.