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.

On the higher settings, you’ll end up with hundreds of images, and much lower run times. OMG Life says the battery should last up to 15 hours on the low setting, a claim we can find no fault with. Aside from snapping on the go, Autographer can also be set in one place, to take snaps of a single scene changing – such as a sunset or a crowd scene.

The resulting images aren’t impressive, however. Motion blur was a common problem, so sequences that would otherwise work quite nicely end up muddled with unclear images. The blur isn’t only from walking or bumping the camera; a breath of wind left photos of trees little more than green smears. Shots are often blown out or too dark, and while the 136 degree wide-angle lens helps the camera capture everything in view, it also means some shots have odd curves and distortion.

The software works well, however. We had some difficulties installing it on a Windows 7 PC – it needs access to your Pictures Library, and without that simply doesn’t work – but does a good job filtering through the thousands of images that Autographer takes over a few active days.

The software can create a quick video slideshow, stop-motion style, of a selection of images, which can be exported as a video at 480p, 720p or 1080p, or an animated GIF.

You can set how many frames are shown per second, add music, and it’s easy enough to remove images if they’re blurry. It’d be handy if the software had an automated way of stripping out blurry or useless photos, though. One clever feature in the software is the map. As it snaps, the Autographer captures GPS coordinates, plotting photos on a map, letting you view images by area or follow your progress on a hike, for example.

Like the Lytro – the light-field camera that lets you focus after the fact – this isn’t a replacement for your regular camera. It could be a fun toy to supplement travel photography or for outdoor activities, but the low quality images and blurry results make it ideal for neither. And like the Lytro, it’s £400 inc VAT, making it a very expensive toy indeed.

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