Sensor size, not the fraction on the box
About ActionCamList
Every action camera prints a fraction on the box — 1/2.3-inch, 1/1.9-inch, 1/1.3-inch — and that fraction is inherited from video camera tubes rather than from the sensor inside, so it hides exactly the difference it looks like it is describing. Converted into square millimetres, the 42 cameras here run from 18 mm² to 116 mm²: a factor of 6 in light-collecting area, across a set of labels that all look roughly the same size. That number is on every card on this site, and the box will not give it to you.
Four numbers this site works out
Most of what is here is copied carefully rather than calculated: frame rates, weights, mount systems, screen sizes. Four figures are worked out, and they are the reason the site exists.
Sensor area comes out of the optical-format table, in square millimetres, for every camera including the spherical ones — where it is the area of one lens’s sensor, because that is what decides the noise in the direction you end up looking. Reframed width answers what an “8K” 360 camera is worth once you pull a normal 16:9 clip out of the sphere: about 80/360ths of the recorded width, which drops 8K to under 2K and is labelled an estimate wherever it appears.
Runtime is never stored without the setting it was measured at, because makers quote the least demanding mode they have — usually 1080p with the radios off — and print it on the box. Year-one cost adds the annual plan to the price, but only for the 18 cameras whose plan actually gates something: a stabilisation mode, a replacement scheme. A brand selling optional cloud storage nobody needs does not get charged for it here.
How cameras are sorted, and where the specs come from
Every camera lands in one of 5 body types — Flagship action, Compact / mini, 360, Budget action, Pocket gimbal — assigned by what the body is and where it mounts, not by the marketing tier the brand sells it in. A pocket gimbal and a helmet camera answer different questions, and a listing that mixes them without saying so is the reason people buy the wrong one.
The specifications themselves are the manufacturer’s own published pages and manuals first, with named third-party measurements filling gaps where a maker leaves a field empty. Each entry records the URLs it was built from. Units are converted once and once only — square millimetres, metres, minutes, grams, megabits per second — which is what lets a $84 pool camera and a $1,099 spherical body share a table row without a footnote. The methodology page lists every field and its source.
Owner notes, and the cameras that do not have any
Overheating, seal failures, a mount that cracks in the cold: these are the things that decide whether an action camera was a good buy, and none of them are on a spec sheet. Those notes come from public owner discussion, retailer reviews and published long-term tests, and they are marked as owner sentiment rather than as measurement every time they appear.
27 of the 42 cameras have enough real discussion behind them to summarise. 15 entries carry an explicit mark in the data saying they were written from the specification sheet alone, and any camera with no owner notes prints a line explaining the gap rather than leaving the panel blank — a blank panel reads as a broken page, and a filled one would be an invention. Nothing here says “owners say” about a camera whose owners nobody here has read.
Where the budget tier goes blank
A blank cell here means nobody published the figure. It does not mean the camera lacks the feature, and it is never filled with a plausible-looking estimate. The budget tier is where this bites hardest: 15 of 42 cameras publish no bitrate, 24 no colour depth, 18 no aperture and 13 no cold operating rating.
Star ratings work the same way, which is why you will not see any. A rating only renders where a named retailer or a maker’s own store publishes an owner-review average that can be pointed at, and where that source is not Amazon — republishing Amazon’s stars is not something this site does. Today 0 cameras clear that bar, so the listing sorts on sensor area instead and no score is estimated to fill the column.
Who builds this, and how it is paid for
Two people, fitting it around other work. No office, no test lab and no staff: nobody here has strapped these cameras to a helmet and ridden down a mountain, and no page claims otherwise. What this site is good at is reading 42 specification sheets carefully, in the same order, and making them comparable.
No money changes hands with any camera maker. There is no paid placement, no sponsored entry, no pay-to-rank, and no retailer or affiliate link anywhere on the site — not on the cards, not on the camera pages, not in the guides. Nothing here earns a commission if you buy a camera, which is the only arrangement under which “this one has a smaller sensor than the box implies” is a sentence we can afford to write. The privacy page covers what the site stores, which is almost nothing.
How often it changes
Whenever something moves, rather than on a schedule: a new body, a discontinuation, a firmware release that changes what a camera can record, a price drop, a subscription tier that quietly starts gating a feature it used to include. The category churns — 14 of the 42 cameras here launched within the last two catalogue years — so the catalogue carries its own date rather than a claim of freshness. It was last updated October 7, 2026, and that date is what every sitemap entry and every “last updated” line on the site is generated from.
Found something wrong
Specifications move, models get revised mid-run, and a figure copied from a maker’s page can be wrong on the maker’s page. Corrections are the most useful thing anyone sends in, and they are acted on rather than filed — send one here.
Start here
The sensor area is on every card. Sort by it and the fractions stop mattering.