Sena 50C 4K Camera and Mesh Communicator System Review | Cruiseman's Reviews

Is this the best new action camera communicator combination for motovloggers or is it just more the same? Well, let's check it out. Hey everybody, welcome back to Cruiseman's Reviews. Today we're going to be doing an unboxing video and taking a look at the brand new Sena 50C. I got my hands on one, Sena sent me one of these. I want to thank them for that and I also wanted to let you know this video is not sponsored by Sena. They're not paying me to do this video, but they did send me this pre-production 50C to take a look at and to review and to talk to you about. Let's take a look inside the box. Before we do, I'm really excited to take a look at this, but before we do, I want to remind you, if you're passionate about motorcycles and you love riding on two wheels, please take a second to click that subscribe button down below here somewhere and don't forget to click that notification bell so that YouTube can remind you and let you know when we come out with brand new videos. Once again, Sena has very nice packaging. This is the 50C of course. Okay, this here is the communicator itself and when I first pick it up out of the package, it feels pretty substantial. I'm not sure if this is going to replace the current 10C Evo or if it's in addition to. I'm not sure yet. I have not heard officially what the plans are. Let's take a look underneath here. I believe we have a box that's going to have a bunch of goodies in it. Looks like we have an owner's manual down here. So, let me unpack all this stuff and we'll take a look at what's inside. I should also point out that this system has the sound by Harman Kardon. That's one of the differences and it's actually stamped on these two mounts here. So, I assume that means the speakers are Harman Kardon and the microphone actually does look a little different than Sena's other boom mic that I've seen. First, we have the speakers. These are the Harman Kardon speakers that go in the helmet. There is a single plug here and another little plug that I think goes to the microphone. You have the firmware updating via Wi-Fi. I can't remember what they call this right off the top of my head. I'll put it on the screen, but it's the way that you can update the firmware on the camera if you don't have a computer available to you. We also get a boom microphone which looks quite a bit more substantial than what I recall seeing on other Sena products, so maybe that's part of the Harman Kardon experience. It has a little bit more of a just a little bit more substantial looking microphone. You also get a microphone for use with a full face helmet which is like a little stick-on velcro microphone that would fit on the inside of your chin mount. We have a couple of velcro spacers for your speakers, little standoffs to make the speakers closer to your ears if you need that. We have some foam to go on the end of the microphone and we have three different mounting systems. You have one that I think is kind of the top of the line. I think they call this the gear mount and uses a couple of allen bolts that mount on the end. This clip mounts on the inside of the helmet and this particular mount allows you to adjust quite a bit of range. You can adjust the rotation of the camera. You can also make some other adjustments to the camera so I think this is kind of what I would consider to be more the high-end top-of-the-line mounting system. This one can be adjusted too but basically you adjust it just by slipping it around on the helmet. It doesn't have that separate little gear. There's also a stick-on mount so that you have like the 3M adhesive if you have the type of helmet where you simply can't mount one of these. You can always go with this adhesive mount and it has kind of a curve to it to fit the curve of a helmet. And then you have various velcro mount pads here with 3M backing and then of course the unit itself and some manuals. Now the unit itself, let me get all this stuff off to the side and let's focus on the unit itself. This is the 50C. It's nice looking. It looks very similar to the 50S. If you see this is the 50S you can see the similarity. They both have the same style jog dial. They both have the antenna that pops up. This is the mesh antenna. This one has the mesh antenna also. You kind of push on this one to get it up. Then the mesh recording or mesh on off button is right kind of toward behind that antenna. It's easy to get to if the antenna is up. Okay and then we can compare it to the 10C EVO. It has more of a stubby built-in antenna. It doesn't have a pop-up antenna and just looking at the ergonomics you can see that the 50C is larger in size than the 10C EVO. It's just a little bit bulkier. It feels a little heavier, not a lot heavier, but a little bit heavier. It has the same style port or similar I don't know if it's exact same but I think it is the same style port where your speakers and your microphone plug into. It also has the phone button on the back. One difference though is there is a camera button on the bottom of the 50C and there's not a camera button on the bottom. I believe the camera button is on the top on the 10C EVO. They both have a jog dial even though this one is more in the style of the 50S and they both have the button on the jog dial where you can press in to do certain functions. This 10C EVO has a micro USB charging port whereas the 50C has the much more desirable USB-C charging port and I that's going to allow for faster charging and I like it because it's just more universal. The only thing is they don't give you a USB-C cable for charging so you you will need to have a USB-C cable if you plan to charge it but everybody's pretty much got a USB-C cable laying around somewhere. Let's talk about the similarities between these two cameras because as I started going through the documentation and the specs my first question was what is the real difference between these two cameras and honestly other than some of the physical characteristics of the body I don't know what the differences are. They both have similar specifications or virtually identical specifications. They can both record in 1080p 30 frames per second or 1080p 60 frames per second. They can both record in 1440 or 2k at 30 frames per second and they can both record in 4k at 30 frames per second. So Sena did not give us any additional resolutions in the 50C than there is in the 10C EVO. I'm going with the 10C EVO. They also both use a micro USB card up to 128 gigabytes and from what I could tell from the two manuals the recording times are the same. They both require a U3 or greater micro SD card. Both cameras have loop recording which is by the way much nicer than the loop recording on the GoPro. What are the differences between these two cameras because we can already see there's a lot of similarities here. What are you getting in this 50C that you're not getting in the 10C EVO? The 50C has USB-C charging which we mentioned earlier compared to micro USB which to me that's much more preferred. But the biggest advantage and the biggest difference between these two camera communicators is the fact that the 50C has Mesh 2.0 and Open Mesh. If you remember my review of the 50S and if you haven't seen that or if you've forgotten it and you're not familiar with Mesh 2.0 or Open Mesh, go back and watch my video review of the 50S. I'll put a link to it in the description of this video and up above. But basically it is in my opinion a superior way of group ride communications because it no longer requires that you manually pair these headsets to each other. So if you have other riders in your group that have a 50S or a 50R or even a Spyder ST1 or the 50C, they should be able to communicate in this Open Mesh environment seamlessly and it allows up to what Sena claims is virtually an unlimited number of riders in a group which of course is unreasonable to assume it'd be unlimited. But you don't have those limitations that you have with other Mesh systems or with Bluetooth and it is different. It works differently than just communicating with Bluetooth and this one can communicate with say a 10C EVO which is a Bluetooth communicator and you can bridge between these communicators so if you have an Open Mesh environment or a Mesh environment you can still bring in a Bluetooth communicator. My only concern because I have not used this yet, I haven't installed it on my helmet, haven't haven't played with it yet, I don't know if this has the same chipset and firmware as the 50S. The reason is because the 50S works beautifully with my Honda Goldwing. Now again I'm talking from the perspective of a Honda Goldwing owner, a 2018 plus. If you ride a BMW or a Harley or an Indian or any other motorcycle, Ducati, any other motorcycle that has an audio system that will connect to a Bluetooth communicator, I'm not speaking to that right now. So the first thing we're going to do is we're going to plug this into this Wi-Fi adapter and we're going to see if we can't update the firmware to the latest version of this firmware. I've just recently updated the firmware on my 50S so let's get the new firmware updated on this. We're going to mount it on my HJC IS MAX 2. A big test for me is to pair this with my Honda Goldwing. I'll also pair it to my Garmin GPS. So let's go out and mount it up and update the firmware and get started and let's go to the garage. You can see here I carved out some of this styrofoam liner. I did that because it makes the speakers fit a little better. I can adjust them a little bit higher up if I need to. Now if we look at the left side of the helmet you can see I've already got a piece of velcro here for the boom mic. That's because I previously tested the 50R which has the same kind of velcro attached boom mic. So I left that in place and I will use that for this new boom mic which attaches the same way. So if you don't have either of these in your helmet you would need to put that velcro pad in the ear socket or the earphone speaker socket hole right there on your helmet. Okay I'm going to put the new speaker in. I'm going to have this wire kind of I'm going to have it go around the outside or the rear. I should say of this little snap here and I'm just going to have that one go straight down like this. Actually now I'm going to change that. I'm going to have it go back as well because it's going to go underneath this little head liner. Now we're back working on the left side and I'm just working on a towel a bath towel here just keep the helmet from scratching up the table. And now we're going to install the boom mic. I'll put it about right there. You can move it up on this pad. There's a hook and loop fastener here. I can always unhook it and slide it up if I need to to get it farther away or closer to my mouth. So we'll do it right there and then I'm going to put another hook and loop on this little piece of plastic right here to hold this guide in place something like this. And then I'm just going to tack this down like that. Now let's install the clamp. We're going to I'm going to use this one here which has the little gear the little like I think call it a gear clamp. And it's just going to slip in between this right here and sit about like that right there if I remember correctly. And I like to tighten this down pretty tight so it's really secure. That's pretty tight. That's on there pretty good. This is the cable that goes to our microphone or goes in between the boom mic and the headset. And there are little arrows. You can see how it goes. There's a little marker here that goes in this hole I believe. No actually it goes on the other side. So let's do it like this I think. Yeah just like that. Now we can put our ear pads back in. Gear clamp installed. And with this little gear loosened up you can turn this mount and angle it with quite a bit of degree of flexibility. So I'm going to go slip it on. I'm just guessing right now at to what angle I want because I can move this camera to a variety of angles based on you know which way my head is. And I think my head is normally about like this on the helmet. So I'm going to angle this up a little bit like that. And now all I have to do is tighten down that gear. Yeah slip this off. Now when I tighten up that gear it's going to hold this plate in place. And now when I slip the camera on and if I put the helmet on I should be aimed pretty much straight ahead. It might be going down a little. We'll find out when I test it. And then all we have to do is take our plug here and it just goes right into this port. Lock it down like that. And in fact today I have two cameras. Not only do I have my trusty GoPro Hero 10 Black which is mounted to the front of my helmet. And I'll talk a little bit more about that in a second. But I also am testing out the Senna 50C combination Bluetooth communicator and action camera. And I will be switching between the two views during this ride so that you can see and compare how this Senna performs both with video and with audio. Because I am recording my audio to the Senna and the GoPro. After 0.2 miles turn left towards W Hebron Parkway. Okay there you can see we're getting some audio through the Senna headset for the navigation on this BMW. Senna 50C has the mesh 2.0 communicator Bluetooth or actually it's their mesh technology. But where this communicator really shines it's along the same lines as the Senna 50S or the 50R. It has that same mesh technology so you can use open mesh. And I've done a couple of simple tests with it. I can't tell any difference between it and the 50S. So I think from the Bluetooth headset communication ability it's the same no better no worse than a 50S which is very good. Now when it comes to connecting this headset to your motorcycle's audio system I found it to be extremely reliable with this BMW. It connects every time. It has not failed one time to connect to the BMW audio system. It has failed to connect to the Honda Goldwing audio system. I would say 50% of the time it will require that you reboot the headset to get it to connect. It will connect but sometimes it doesn't connect the first time. You start the bike you turn on the headset or vice versa. It doesn't matter which order you do it in. So now we're going to compare the video capabilities of this Senna 50C. This is the Senna 50C you're looking at right now on video and one thing you'll notice is the video is pretty bouncy. That means it does not have the same kind of image stabilization as you would find in the GoPro Hero 10 or any of the GoPro cameras for that matter. You'll also notice the colors on the GoPro are more vivid. The blues are a deeper blue. Now this is kind of inherent to a GoPro. Now let's look at these two cameras side by side and I think you'll be able to notice the difference both in the colors and in the image stabilization. There seems to be a little more distortion in the Senna image. Notice that light post on the left as we go by. You'll notice it's leaning more on the Senna 50C than it is on the GoPro. Now some of these things can be corrected in your editing software such as image stabilization. You can add in some image stabilization and you can also do some color grading to bring the colors coming out of the Senna closer to the GoPro. Here I'll apply a little color grading so you can see the difference. This is what it looks like out of the camera and now it will slowly begin to grade. You can see those blue skies are a little bit closer to the colors coming out of the GoPro. So let's go back to the studio and I'm going to give you my final opinion on this Senna 50C. So I've ridden with this Senna 50C now for probably about a month or more. I had this camera actually before it was released to the public. It is a pre-release version but I think it's pretty much the final shipping version of the camera and the communicator. I've kind of split up my pros and cons here and I really kind of debated do I want to go through the positive stuff first or do I want to go through the negative stuff first. Things I like, things I don't like and who do I think this is a good solution for. Okay so I'm just going to go through the the good stuff first and it's mostly good because this is a very very nice piece of equipment. The first thing is I'll say it it's nice to have an integrated camera and communicator all in one nice compact design as opposed to and I'm comparing this to the idea of having a separate bluetooth communicator and maybe using something like a GoPro camera mounted to your helmet. So to do that you've got a much more complexity. You've got to rig up a lavalier mic perhaps inside the helmet or some other audio recording device. This is an all-in-one run and gun solution for doing motovlogging. So it connects to the microphone inside the helmet. You can use it as a two-way communicator. You can do it for vlogging. It's all built in and that's a very very valuable pro you might say or good feature. Also it pairs very easily using the technology. It pairs very very easily to a smartphone. So in my videos I show an example of pairing it to a Goldwing or to the BMW or to perhaps an Indian or whatever that has an audio system. But remember it doesn't treat that any differently than if you paired it to a smartphone. It's just looking at it as an audio system that you're connecting to bluetooth. Same thing with making phone calls or receiving phone calls. It's very seamless and very elegant the way that Sena has designed this to communicate with a smartphone. And it has all the voice commands. Another big plus is you don't have to take your hand off of the handlebars to hit buttons. For most functions you can say hey Sena or hey Sina depending on how you want to pronounce it. I think it works either way. And you can control this communicator camera like increase volume, turn the volume up, turn the volume down, mute. You can hey Sena call Joe or whatever. You can do all kinds of things with voice commands. I wish the Goldwing's audio system worked that way. So it's very elegant the way it uses the voice commands and I found the voice commands to be pretty reliable. You can even start and stop recording using voice commands. Now one big plus is it's a huge value that you've got a communicator and a camera all in one unit for the same price. You're not having to purchase a three or four hundred dollar communicator and a four or five hundred dollar GoPro. You know the newest GoPro is going to be about four or five hundred dollars by itself and then you've got the cost of a communicator. So this is all in one package for one price. I think this retails on their website. The last time I checked I believe it's $549 and by the way if you're interested in the 50C I have all the links in the description of this video where you can order this through Amazon or of course you can check the Sena website. Probably the biggest advantage of this 50C is it's the easiest solution for recording audio on group rides. So if you ride with other people that are using Sena mesh systems or even if the Bluetooth anything coming through the speakers of your helmet through this system will get recorded audio. There's no easier way to do that with a GoPro. You can do it. I've seen it done. I've seen Don do it on his bike. This is the easiest way. If you want to record group rides this is the easiest way to do it hands down. The loop recording feature of this camera is often overlooked and it's a really powerful feature because what it does when you put it into loop recording mode you can think of this sort of like a dash cam or you know that's your helmet of course but basically it's recording everything and it records everything in three minute segments. So when you look at your SD card at the end of the day you're going to have all these different files time coded in three minute increments. So every three minutes you get a whole new file and when you have it in loop recording it's very intelligent. What it does is when your card fills up and you've got no more space on your SD card it goes to the oldest file removes it and replaces it with the newest file that it's currently recording. So that way if your card will say hold three hours of video you'll always have your most recent three hours of video and it depends on the size of your SD card as to how much it will hold and it also depends on the resolution. If you're shooting in 4k your files are going to be bigger than they would be if you're shooting 1080p obviously. So I know another feature of this is it will run on shore power so you can put your usb-c cable in here connected say to a usb port on your goldwing or on your motorcycle whatever motorcycle it is or it could be a separate battery source and you can basically record indefinitely. I love the fact that this now uses usb-c for charging for faster charging and of course when you're connected to an external power source or your motorcycle you can run indefinitely on the usb-c power. Another really great feature of this camera is very very clear audio recording. I found that the boom mic that comes with this does an excellent job of getting out getting rid of the wind noise even better than my gopro lavalier mic which i have a a nice uh protector on there to kind of manage the wind noise. This microphone does a much better job and you get extremely clear audio but with everything there are downsides there are some cons there are some things that i'm not crazy about with this uh 50c so let me go through those real quick and then at the end i'm going to tell you who i think this is a really good fit for one thing i'm not crazy about is that it records all of the audio on both channels so it does have stereo recording so it it does have a left and right channel but when you're on a group ride or it could just be one other person or it could be your passenger it doesn't matter when you're both talking it's recording your voice and the other voices or whatever the other audio source is all on both channels so if when you're on a group ride sometimes the group coming through your speakers coming through the sound system is much lighter or doesn't have the volume that your voice does it's hard to adjust that in post when you're editing i wish that senna would offer an option in the firmware or in the software actually where you could choose to have your voice on one channel and all the other audio coming through on the on the right channel or the left channel you could pick which channel you want to put it on and then when you're in editing you could raise the level of your voice or lower the level of your voice you could even out the audio better and that could just be an option in the firmware or in the app that you could set do you want everything on one channel or or everything on two channels or do you want your voice separated in one channel and the other audio in another channel that that would be a big big benefit for people that are serious editors the other thing i'm not crazy about is there's little or no image stabilization so you get a lot of very shaky video now i mentioned in the video that you can you can edit you can deal with some of that in post if you're an editor if you're a you know if you know final cut pro or you know da vinci or some of these other they have ways that you can stabilize those images but you lose resolution when you do that if you're shooting in 4k and you're producing a 1080p video then yes you've got some room to play with but i just wish it had better image stabilization in the camera also the colors coming out of the camera i think are a little muted and kind of washed out not a lot of dynamic range on the camera i would like to see center come out with better mounting system i like the little gear mount it does allow you to adjust the uh the rotation of the camera and it also allows you to adjust the lens where you can uh the horizon basically of the lens but there's no way to adjust for this right here this back and forth so you're able to adjust this axis you're able to adjust this axis but you're not able to adjust this axis that would be a nice solution a little bit more mounting options but they do give you quite a few mounting a lot of mounting hardware in the kit but you can only adjust on those two axes one thing that really bothers me is there's no way to really effectively use this on some of and that's because on the newer hjc helmets they've put the sunshade control right here on the side of the helmet where you would normally mount this camera if you want to use an external communicator like the 50c or the even the 50s it has to mount way back you know toward the back of the helmet so your camera would be pointing way out here it's not going to get straight ahead so i'm not sure if senna is going to come up with a way again another mounting solution might be a fix for that but there's really no way to use this on some of these newer hjc helmets i'd really like to see 4k 60 recording uh 60 frames per second right now all you can do in 4k is 30 frames per second and i was kind of hoping with this new camera basically the specs are identical to the 10c evo so i was i was kind of hoping that we would get 4k 60 in this new camera but not this time the only other real negative i can think of as far as this product goes is it's only a helmet cam it's i mean it is a bluetooth communicator and a great mesh bluetooth communicator but for the standpoint of a camera all it is is for motor vlogging on your helmet whereas a gopro you know you can put it on a tripod you can put it on a selfie stick you could scuba dive with it this is a multi-purpose type camera whereas the 50c is strictly a helmet you're going to have a hard time putting this on a tripod and getting audio into it because there's no mic jack on here so you pretty much have to use the microphone the boom mic or the other mic that comes with this system so that's it's a single purpose product now those are all my negatives who do i think this is good for i think if you don't have a bluetooth communicator but you need one you're going to get a bluetooth communicator anyway and you want to do motor vlogging this is your this is your solution if you want something simple that's much much easier than a gopro setup on your helmet this is the way to go it's very this is a run and gun solution you basically mount it you've got your bluetooth communicator you can listen to music on your phone you can record video you can put it in loop recording use it like a dash cam so it's always recording everything another cool feature that i would like to see senna do is come out with one of these that has a camera in the front and a camera in the back then you would have like a real true dash cam where you're recording everything in front of you everything behind you that would be pretty cool so uh that's just for the future thought process for sun if you're if you're listening other than that uh it's a good camera it's a good product it's a great it's a better communicator than it is a camera that's kind of i'd say it's 80 communicator 20 camera whereas a gopro is 100 camera it has no communication capability but it's still a good camera so if you've used the senna 50c i'd like you to put your comments down below do you agree with me disagree what are your comments what are your thoughts what has your experience been in using this product and if you have any other questions or comments about this review please put them in the comments down below i didn't show everything i didn't show the app i didn't show all the pairing there's a lot of videos on youtube that get into that maybe i'll do another video where i show how to pair it to a motorcycle and to a smartphone and use it for that purpose but i was basically trying to focus more on the camera aspects of this as opposed to the communicator aspects i am very pleased with it it is a product i will use again in the future and let me know in the comments what you think hey if you liked this video please take a second click that thumbs up really does help out the channel and i will look forward to seeing you on the next cruise man's reviews