Night vision spy camera $10 high gain microphone test

Sony's NightShot can do amazing things for filming video in complete darkness. But especially for recording video outdoors in the dark, you want to hear what's going on outside at night, as well as see it. I found a $10 G.E. microphone that is nothing special when hooked up to a computer, but when connected to the "Plug-In Power" mic input of a Sony camcorder, it becomes extremely sensitive, to the point that it can pick up the sound of footsteps over 80 feet away!

In fact, you don't want it too close to the camcorder or else it will pick up the tape motor or hard drive noise very strongly (unless you have a flash memory camcorder or are doing direct FireWire capture to a computer or external DVD recorder). Also you need to use a well shielded extension cable or else will you hear a high pitched whine in the audio. The extension cable and stand that comes with the GE mic has that problem due to its very thin cable, so I made my own setup, as I show in the video.

I cannot guarantee equally good results with other brands of camcorders. Like I said, I tried the GE mic with my computer's mic input and its sensitivity was nothing special in that case. Also it requires a powered mic jack, so it will not work with audio tape recorders or Canon camcorders. It does work fine with the Aiptek GVS and Kodak Zi8 camcorders, though, as YouTuber "fishycomics" has demonstrated on his channel.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• ge
• g.e.
• general
• electric
• 98950
• target
• high
• gain
• shotgun
• external
• pc
• mic
• microphone
• plug-in
• power
• powered
• test
• sony
• night
• shot
• nightshot
• video
• camera
• camcorder
• spy
• vision
• surveillance
• recording
• audio
• pickup

[redtv4me2010]

What is the model of the GE Mic?

[vwestlife]

@redtv4me2010 It is GE model 98950.

[kargaroc386]

The music from 0:12 to 1:00 what is it?

[vwestlife]

@kargaroc386 I don't know. I got it from a broadcast of Radio 227 in the Netherlands. They use it as the closing theme for their news reports.

[survivor030406]

good demonstration. I can't find a video I saw a coupe days ago. It showed one particular sony camera that had adjustable nightshot mode or sensitivity. Which video is it?

[vwestlife]

@survivor030406 I'm not familiar with everyone else's videos, but among my own, in "Sony CCD-TR940 Hi8 XR stereo camcorder full overview & demo" I demonstrate adjusting the exposure while in Nightshot mode.

[6minutetutorials]

@vwestlife dude the Sony digital8 handycam DCR-TRV103 got nightvision and it has a mic input

[TehMG]

Yeah most computer's mic-in jacks aren't very good especially on integrated sound card and a lot of sound cards too. They have mic boost feature but it is extremely noisy.

I built a USB powered mic pre-amp so I could use an XLR dynamic mic with my computer, as it needs more gain than the sound card can provide without mic boost.

[weasel2htm]

Simple as that, I expected something more technical.

[vwestlife]

@weasel2htm I swapped the colors because the cable was made with the colors reversed... its red plug is the left channel and its white plug is the right channel, the opposite of normal. But in this case it doesn't really matter anyway since the microphone is only mono.