Ah. Those nasty little low-res CMOS cameras with built-in transmitter I'd guess, judging by the funky colours and the way extremely bright light wraps to black. Decent range, but iffy video. Pretty good otherwise, though, given the limitations of the hardware. I assume you were recording onto a laptop hard drive? How were you capturing the video?

The easystar is a very nice airplane. It's very stable and will lift a surprisingly large payload, assuming you can find somewhere to put it. I have one I've used for some years as a camera plane. I removed some foam below the wing, reinforced it with liteply to form an instrument bay, and stuck a canon Ixus 400 in it. This is about 230g of payload, which is about 35% of the entire aircraft weight! Mind you, with a small brushless motor and 1500mAh Lipo pack you save nearly 100g to start with, and get a lot more performance.

The magister flies very well indeed. It, again, really needs a brushless motor and lipos for best results, but doesn't everything? That said, it will fly quite adequately on the stock geared brushed motor, although with NiMH batteries it's pretty heavy.

I've found that I seldom use all four channels, not touching the rudder much except for steering on the ground. It will turn quite nicely on either ailerons or rudder, and I normally only bother with ailerons. Adding rudder can make the turns neater especially in the wind, but I'm not usually fussed with that

It will fly well in fairly high winds, I've flown it on days where it was blowing at around 12-15 mph. It doesn't like gusty weather much though. Be warned that such an aircraft reacts much more vigorously to control inputs than the easystar, so you have to be gentle with it, at least until you're used to it. The things do bounce quite well if it all goes wrong.

I've wanted to get one of those boat/plane things for some time, but at the moment feel I have too many aircraft already There's at least seven fixed wing aircraft and two helicopters kicking around in flyable condition, and perhaps 5 or 6 more in the loft, three of which I haven't even built yet! The collection starts to grow rather rapidly when you get into the hobby. The damn things are all over the house, like computers and cat hair.

pca