SJCAM SJ6 Ultra: Is the £100 Action Camera Making a Comeback?

There was a time when buying an action camera meant making a fairly simple choice. You either spent a sizeable amount of money on one of the big names, or you took your chances on something considerably cheaper.

SJCAM was one of the companies that helped change that. Its SJ4000 series became enormously popular with people who wanted GoPro-style filming without GoPro-style pricing, and now the company is having another go at that same part of the market with the SJCAM SJ6 Ultra.

And at £99.99 on Amazon UK, it has certainly caught my attention.

I haven’t had one in my hands yet, so this isn’t a review. But looking through the specification, there are a few things here that make the SJ6 Ultra considerably more interesting than another anonymous budget action camera.

Proper 4K without the premium price

The headline feature is native 4K recording, accompanied by a very wide 166-degree field of view.

SJCAM is positioning the SJ6 Ultra as an affordable camera for motorcyclists, travellers, vloggers and people wanting something they can happily take underwater without worrying quite so much about the price of the camera strapped to their helmet.

That’s quite an important distinction.

There are plenty of inexpensive cameras online claiming 4K capability, but increasingly the question isn’t simply whether something can record at 4K. It’s what happens to the footage when you start moving.

For that, SJCAM has included its SteadyMotion V2.0 image stabilisation, which it says is intended to smooth out vibration during activities such as motorcycling and trail riding.

Whether it can compete with the rather impressive stabilisation we’ve become accustomed to from the more expensive action-camera manufacturers is something I’d very much like to test.

Vertical video without chopping your footage to pieces

One feature I didn’t expect to find particularly interesting is native vertical recording.

The SJ6 Ultra can apparently capture vertical footage without needing to rotate the camera or crop a conventional widescreen recording afterwards.

That means footage can be recorded ready for TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts.

I’m normally slightly suspicious when products start throwing social-media features into the marketing material, but this one actually makes sense.

A great deal of video is now consumed vertically, and cropping a 16:9 action-camera recording afterwards can dramatically reduce the useful area of the image. Being able to shoot vertically in-camera could genuinely be useful, particularly for creators who produce content specifically for mobile platforms.

SJCAM has remembered the audio

Cheap cameras often have another problem.

They sound cheap.

Wind noise, poor microphones and limited external audio support can make perfectly respectable video almost unusable.

SJCAM is therefore promoting compatibility with its M4 Wireless Microphone, which is priced at $14.99 in the supplied material. The idea is to offer a complete camera-and-wireless-audio setup without suddenly discovering that your £100 camera requires another £100 or more of accessories before it becomes useful.

That’s potentially one of the SJ6 Ultra’s strongest selling points.

And you actually get accessories

Remember when cameras came with things?

The SJ6 Ultra comes with a collection of mounts and accessories rather than treating every bracket, clip and mounting plate as an additional purchase. SJCAM is making quite a point of the total cost of ownership rather than simply advertising a cheap camera body and leaving you to discover everything else you need afterwards.

Other notable features include:

• 30 metre waterproof housing
• Voice control
• 166-degree ultra-wide lens
• SteadyMotion V2.0 stabilisation
• SJCAM X smartphone app
• Over-the-air firmware updates
• Native vertical video recording
• Compatibility with the SJCAM M4 wireless microphone

The over-the-air firmware updating is particularly welcome. Anyone who has owned older action cameras will probably remember the slightly nerve-racking ritual of downloading firmware files, copying them onto an SD card and hoping the camera comes back to life afterwards.

The interesting bit is the price

SJCAM lists the SJ6 Ultra at $129 in the US, while the UK Amazon price supplied with the announcement is £99.99.

That puts it into a fascinating part of the market.

At around £100, an action camera doesn’t necessarily have to beat a £300 or £400 flagship camera at everything.

It simply has to be good enough.

Good enough for attaching to a motorbike. Good enough for the kids to take swimming. Good enough to leave recording somewhere you wouldn’t necessarily want to risk a considerably more expensive camera. And increasingly, good enough for producing social-media content.

That is essentially the territory in which the original generation of affordable action cameras became so successful.

Has the budget action camera become interesting again?

Smartphones have swallowed enormous parts of the compact-camera market, but there are still situations where I wouldn’t dream of mounting my phone to the outside of a car, attaching it to a motorcycle helmet or taking it several metres underwater.

That’s why action cameras still make sense.

The question is whether you really need to spend several hundred pounds on one.

On paper, the SJCAM SJ6 Ultra looks like an interesting attempt to answer that question with a fairly emphatic “not necessarily”.

At £99.99, with 4K recording, stabilisation, vertical video, waterproofing and inexpensive wireless audio support, there’s enough here to make me want to see what it can actually do.

And that, perhaps, is the most interesting thing about it.

The budget action camera might be worth paying attention to again.