how do you first get this thing working?

I opened it up and put in the battery and plugged in what I think is the charging cord.

Does it take a while to charge up?

I cant find anything in the nstructions.

I guess I will leave it overnight and check it tomorrow.

when the light goes out, its charged

I would like to also know what setting you are using

Here's a couple of mistakes that I made when I first got mine.

Make sure the USB charging cord is completely plugged in to the camera. I couldn't get my charging light to come on for some time. Figured out I needed to push the plug fairly hard to make it click into the camera. No red light, no charge.

They do need to have a decent amount of charge before they will power up. Mine can be a little quirky if it doesn't have a decent charge.

Turning it on while it's charging can be a pain too. Mine doesn't like to do it sometimes. I usually have to unplug mine before I can turn it on.

I use the highest quality setting I can while shooting video. I purchased the 32 gig card so space isn't a big deal to me. The card will outlast the battery, and I move the vids from the stick to my external hard drive when I get home anyway.

The quality of video from these things in HD mode is pretty amazing from a camera this cheap.

I intend to get another battery for mine. 2.5 hours isn't enough to utilize the card memory, and I'm not always somewhere that I can charge it easily. Not to mention it doesn't charge very fast either.

Buck

thanks for the info buck!

sorry to hi-jack......but.....what model is everyone using for there boats......any links......I think I want to get one for this season.........

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuuOL0MjysI

I like this set up the best....

Just got mine and recorded this one today. the instructions that come with it suck....had to figure it out on my own.

My first video...

[youtube]RZiwKPZrZ9A[/youtube]

Nice vid! Did you do anything special to avoid wind noise as I am impressed how little there is?

The camera comes with 2 housings. One has openings and the other has a tiny pin hole. He is using the pinhole one that gets sounds, but no wind noise.

EDIT: I am wrong !!!! I should have looked at mine before posting wrong info. Just checked and it does not have any openings. It does say in the directions to use the closed housing if there will be a lot of wind noise or high speed driving.

Sorry guys !!!!!!!