Finger
Arm
Hair
Salt
Nutella (gross)
Peanut
Serrated knife blade
Ballpoint pen
Printed beer logo
Cloth
Melting snow
[flv:http://ben.akrin.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/temp.flv http://ben.akrin.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Screen-Shot-2013-02-24-at-11.53.58-PM.png 640 426]
TLDR: an awesome cheap device wrapped in Chinese funkiness.
It is hard, very hard to not pay attention to all the funny details that go around the device. But it’s a solid device that performs great for a good price. As far as I can tell, it does not do zooming per se, it is only able to get very close to a subject and thus when the resulting picture is displayed on a bigger screen, small details are visible. As such, what you see is strictly dependent on how close you stick the camera to your subject. In fact the camera has a focus length of a few millimeters to infinity, which means you ca use it a a regular camera but you’ll have to turn the focus knob quite a bit for that.
They are seriously lacking online
On its little tripod
The lens
The device has multiple attachments referred to as “beauty inspection tools” which are meant to stick the camera in various orifices of one’s body. They are nicely sealed in sterilized bags (but not the anal one).
Some of the various “beauty inspection tools”…
The unboxing feels like opening a Chinese treasure chest, the mechanism, the texture, the looks; this product is made in China and not pretending otherwise. What else feels Chinese is pretty much anything written in English. It’s super funny to read it all.
The device is recognized as a standard camera in Windows, MacOS & Linux! No extra drivers necessary. This is what I love about buying products from smaller companies, they go after existing standards. As such you can open it with any webcam software, I took my test shots with photobooth. They provide some software for filming & measuring among other things but I care not about this functionality so I won’t spend the time loading it.
I’ll take it to the beehive this week-end and we’ll see how it does there.
But with a serious loss of functionality. Given the internet connection that I have (cellular) I can’t reasonably set it up to do live streaming. I’ve also disabled interaction with the cam. What’s left is an image uploaded every hour. Not super duper cool but I’ll take what I can get in this neck of the woods.
Hopefully this will get better when better internet is available.
