Autographer review

OMG Life’s Autographer camera is an intriguing idea: it’s a hands-off, wearable “life-logger”, which takes snaps without any interaction from the user. The 5-megapixel camera doesn’t dumbly take a snap at a set iteration, such as taking a photo every minute. Instead, it “intelligently” decides upon the best moment to capture using five sensors: a motion detector, accelerometer, magnetometer, light and thermometer, although exactly how a change in temperature signals it’s time to snap an image is unclear.

The small, light device features a lens on the front and a clip on the rear, to let you attach it to your clothing. There’s a small OLED display showing menu options, which is navigated via two buttons along the side. Turn it on, clip it to your shirt, and it’ll capture photos throughout the day – hundreds of them. It has 8GB of storage, enough to store 28,000 images.

The lens can be slid shut to stop the camera taking shots, such as if you’re in the toilet or somewhere else where photography isn’t a wise decision. When it does capture a shot, a blue LED lights up to let you – and the people standing around you – know what it’s doing.

There’s no shutter to tell the camera to take a shot, although there is “sequence mode”, a slow burst mode that captures a series of nine photos – handy if you really want to capture a particular scene, and don’t trust the sensors. There’s also no display to play back the images or viewfinder to see what the camera sees – you simply have to trust the Autographer to do its thing.

There are three capture modes, which adjust the sensitivity of the sensors and, therefore, the frequency of the shots. While out on a walk on the low-frequency setting, it captured about 170 photos over four hours, and burned through about 15% of the battery.