Opening the box for this thing was like swirling in a Hot Tub Time Machine. I was directly taken back to Radio Shack of the 1990’s. Plastic, large sliding buttons and a FM antenna.
So why bother with this $130 wireless system? Most people know they need a Sennheiser EW100 as at least a baseline wireless system. But now in 2011, many people are buying DSLR cameras for video and spending less than $300 for excellent video cameras that have terrrible audio. Most first inclinations are to add a completely useless shotgun to the top of the camera.
Even if this system isn’t the greatest, it’s still 100x more useful than tiny shotgun 7 feet away from your talent.
So how does it fare? For the price, it is certainly usable for web work. The line output is fairly low, but most of these DSLRs have AGC so it’s probably not going to matter. It captures a very compressed and bass-y version of the human voice, but for no budget run and gun style web videos I could see it being perfectly adequate. No, its not going to work over long distances. No, its not going to work with any other interference in the area, but it is going to work better than the built in mic on your dslr and it will work better than a silly shotgun sitting on top of the camera.