It seems everything is being turned into a video camera these days. Case in point, the Looxie. The Looxie is a Bluetooth headset you wear on your ear and that works with any cell phone for handsfree communication. But it’s also a video camera…recording up to 5 hours of video as well.
The Looxie comes with a free app (for Android phones, not sure about iPhones) that also displays your live video feed on your cell phone, so you can glance at your cell phone to verify what the camera is actually seeing. And the app let’s you edit your recorded video too, then upload it to YouTube, Facebook, etc.
It doesn’t shoot HD video, just what they call “HVGA”, which I’m guessing means 640×480 video. And it records audio too. What happens if you get a phone call while shooting video? It keeps recording the video but mutes the audio so you can talk on your phone.
Of course it is a tiny camera you’re wearing over your ear, so unless your head is as steady as a tripod I wouldn’t expect the smoothest of video. The Looxie sells for $199 and is available on Amazon here.
This product is a great idea. A small wearable camera. Who wouldn’t want that?
Well, unfortunately, there are a number of flaws with this device.
For one, the quality is not very good. 15 frames per second and low resolution. This means your videos are not going to look as good as the example videos. Also, the camera has a somewhat narrow field of vision. It would be much better if it taped a wider angle, because you are not going to be that good at aiming the thing. (You can kinda see the effect in their sample video on YouTube where the guy proposes to his girlfriend and video tapes mostly her chest… it’s involuntarily funny).
Also, somehow the camera would need a serious image stabilizer. I have no idea how that would work with a camera like that, but the reality is that people move their heads a lot and very fast and with the low frame rate and resolution, that is a problem to begin with, and even if that was better, people watching your videos are still going to get disoriented or worse, unless you seriously restrict your movements.
The device also doesn’t seem to be very sturdy. My ear-plug part broke off the first day. Granted, I wore it under an ice hockey helmet (and Looxcie even says it isn’t meant to be a ruggedized product). But it’s not like I took a shot to the head. It was just pushing it under a relatively tight helmet that did it, disappointingly.
The worst aspect of this product however is what must go down as one of the oddest technical and business decisions of all time: The camera requires a smart phone to operate. You can now use an Android phone as well as an iPhone. That is mandatory. I have no idea why. Granted, it is a cute to use the phone display as a view finder. Kudos for that. It is also nifty to be able to quickly upload 30 second snippets of video to all kinds of sites. I like that as well and can think of plenty of uses for that. But I can also think of plenty of scenarios where I need more. And you don’t get that.
You have to use the phone to do all video editing. The camera has some proprietary internal storage mechanism you can’t get to unless you turn your buffered video into snippets of up to 30 minutes of video. So you use your phone to scan back and forth in videos to cut them. If you have ever used the iPhone video player, you know what a pain that is. Now when you do that, the video is still stored on the camera.
And grabbing these video segments is SLOW. I think what happens is that the phone grabs video segments from the camera, puts them together into a video file, and then puts it back onto the camera. Or maybe it just somehow instructs the camera to do this. Either way, it takes forever. (You can also download videos to your phone, once they are saved as snippets. That is even slower. Downloading 5 minutes of video to my iPhone took 15 minutes or so… and then it crashed the phone). Which is no big surprise really, because neither the camera nor a smart phone has enough power to do a lot of video editing. And your segments are limited to 30 minutes max.
And if it is more than a minute or 2, it is too large to just upload to sites like YouTube of Facebook. So what you will end up doing is this: You have the camera recording (which is a bit fidgety, but OK). Then, you use your phone to try to edit the segment you want. You then wait for that to save (like 10 minutes or more). Then, you repeat the same thing with your next 30 minutes. Except it is almost impossible to find the right stitching points. If you want all 5 hours of video, you need to make at least 10 segments. More likely 15, since you will have trouble with the overlap. You do the math on how long that takes. Then, once you are done, you plug the USB cable into your computer and download the videos. Well, usually it takes a few tries for a Windows 7 machine to recognize the camera as a storage device. But then you can download your video.
Why the heck they would not use a PC to allow for editing and view finding is completely beyond me. They could have used PC Bluetooth. They could have used the USB cable. They could have created a powerful app that grabs everything on the camera and then you could have done advanced editing easily on the PC. Or they could have leveraged existing video editing software. And processing videos that are more than 30 minutes would not have been a problem at all!
Oh, and you better not change your phone. Because if you change your phone (which most people… especially gadget freaks that are likely to buy this camera… do often) then your camera may be useless. Or who knows? What if Looxcie’s software (which only runs with some difficulty on the iPhone now it seems) won’t be upgraded to the next version of the OS? Then you are stuck with a camera that can only record 30 second segments of video, because that is all it can do without a phone.
This whole decision so boggles my mind, that I would actually like to meet the person who made it, because you really don’t often get the opportunity to meet people that think and reason quite so differently from the rest of us. It would be a meeting I would never forget, I am sure 😉
Anyway: I considered giving this product only 2 stars. But on the other hand, it is not all that expensive. And it is kinda nifty in what it does. If only they hap PC software, it would be much better. The overall concept is awesome. I will certainly buy a newer one once they have HD and higher frame rates and such. But for now, it is just a nifty gadget that has potential but doesn’t really quite do what you are hoping for…