OK I admit I'm a sucker for new tech stuff. However these RayBan Smart glasses are going on 3 years since the first generation release and have gotten much better. But one needs to understand the limitations. First I will go into my personal history with what I call "spy glasses." that you can record in video of what you are looking at.
1. Three years ago the resolution was not good. 720P and no image stabilization. Recording time about an hour of MP4 standard format.
2. I upgraded early last year to a Chinese pair that bragged on 1080P quality but still no image stabilization and being HD there was considerable jitter.
3. Earlier this year I was a sucker for another pair of glasses that bragged on 4K UHD with Image stabilization. OK they work but still the image stabilization was awful. But I was able to achieve some stabilization in Adobe Premier Pro Warp Stabilizer with my own custom settings. Lots of time consuming experimenting. Not great as hardware stabilization like we have with DJI Action cameras but OK for personal video. This is a real time consuming operation in Premier Pro.
So I just decided to jump into these Meta Ray Ban glasses after viewing dozens of review videos so I know the negatives.
My testing of these show superb image stabilization and perfect image quality including HDR like handling of extreme lighting. Auto iris is fast as any Action camera. The imager is a 12 Mega pixel but shoots video in 1392H x 1856V pixels MP4 format. OK so it is not wide screen but it may be cropped to 16wide x 9tall in post and the image quality won't suffer much due to the original being a 12MP image. It's not 4K of course but rendering the program to 1080P will be pretty good looking in good lighting. I watched the video on my 108"wide Home Theater screen.
The second negative is that it is not intended to be a "Spy Cam" due to its ridiculous flashing LED sensor while recording. However there is a simple hack that this can be fooled into hiding behind a piece of black electrical tape. But without the hack you will get an error message that the LED sensor is blocked. So performing a simple start procedure you can shoot a full 3 minute video clip maximum length with the LED blocked.
That's the third negative- You can only shoot a maximum clip length of 3 minutes and then need to restart the recording so you may miss some of the action.
I've run some testing with the glasses and it will lose about 8% of battery charge in one 3 minute recording. So you can record about 36 minutes on a charge. To charge, you place the glasses in the case that will recharge them in about 45 minutes back to 100%. There is a 3rd party accessory that you can add that will recharge while even recording video with a cable that plugs into your iphone USB C. This worked great and adds about 4 % of charge per minute of recording. I tested with my iphone 15 Pro Max. Smaller iphones may not be as efficient.
I ordered the clear lenses since the colors were more expensive and their auto sunlight sunglasses got really bad reviews. A third party company makes a set of custom lenses that snap on and don't resemble the older style clip on glasses. Plus they come in polarized and metal reflective choices with different colors. Not expensive.
The smart functions use your iphone running near by for some things Language translator. I loaded Spanish to English. It translates in real time which is pretty cool.
There is no heads up display and all smart AI functions work with audio which I found to be as good as my Meta Quest 3 audio quality including surround sound. To view the clip you recorded you have to transfer the glasses storage to your iphone which takes a couple minutes but the sound continues to come out of the glasses in surround sound.
1. Three years ago the resolution was not good. 720P and no image stabilization. Recording time about an hour of MP4 standard format.
2. I upgraded early last year to a Chinese pair that bragged on 1080P quality but still no image stabilization and being HD there was considerable jitter.
3. Earlier this year I was a sucker for another pair of glasses that bragged on 4K UHD with Image stabilization. OK they work but still the image stabilization was awful. But I was able to achieve some stabilization in Adobe Premier Pro Warp Stabilizer with my own custom settings. Lots of time consuming experimenting. Not great as hardware stabilization like we have with DJI Action cameras but OK for personal video. This is a real time consuming operation in Premier Pro.
So I just decided to jump into these Meta Ray Ban glasses after viewing dozens of review videos so I know the negatives.
My testing of these show superb image stabilization and perfect image quality including HDR like handling of extreme lighting. Auto iris is fast as any Action camera. The imager is a 12 Mega pixel but shoots video in 1392H x 1856V pixels MP4 format. OK so it is not wide screen but it may be cropped to 16wide x 9tall in post and the image quality won't suffer much due to the original being a 12MP image. It's not 4K of course but rendering the program to 1080P will be pretty good looking in good lighting. I watched the video on my 108"wide Home Theater screen.
The second negative is that it is not intended to be a "Spy Cam" due to its ridiculous flashing LED sensor while recording. However there is a simple hack that this can be fooled into hiding behind a piece of black electrical tape. But without the hack you will get an error message that the LED sensor is blocked. So performing a simple start procedure you can shoot a full 3 minute video clip maximum length with the LED blocked.
That's the third negative- You can only shoot a maximum clip length of 3 minutes and then need to restart the recording so you may miss some of the action.
I've run some testing with the glasses and it will lose about 8% of battery charge in one 3 minute recording. So you can record about 36 minutes on a charge. To charge, you place the glasses in the case that will recharge them in about 45 minutes back to 100%. There is a 3rd party accessory that you can add that will recharge while even recording video with a cable that plugs into your iphone USB C. This worked great and adds about 4 % of charge per minute of recording. I tested with my iphone 15 Pro Max. Smaller iphones may not be as efficient.
I ordered the clear lenses since the colors were more expensive and their auto sunlight sunglasses got really bad reviews. A third party company makes a set of custom lenses that snap on and don't resemble the older style clip on glasses. Plus they come in polarized and metal reflective choices with different colors. Not expensive.
The smart functions use your iphone running near by for some things Language translator. I loaded Spanish to English. It translates in real time which is pretty cool.
There is no heads up display and all smart AI functions work with audio which I found to be as good as my Meta Quest 3 audio quality including surround sound. To view the clip you recorded you have to transfer the glasses storage to your iphone which takes a couple minutes but the sound continues to come out of the glasses in surround sound.
