Google Clips review

(digital melody)
- This is the Google Clips.
It's a $250 smart camera that uses AI
to detect and capture important moments in your life.
Now if you're a parent or a pet owner,
you're probably familiar with the frustration
of trying to capture great candids
of your kids' or pets' activities.
Or maybe you're familiar with having a ton
of photos and video or your family members,
but you're not in any of them,
because you're always the one behind the camera.
Now Google thinks Clips can solve that frustration,
by providing a camera that can do all of
the shooting for you.
The only problem is, well,
the Clips just doesn't really work that well.
(inhaling)
(exhaling)
(clapping)
- [ALL] Yay! (cheering)
- No, no
- Happy Birthday! No.
- Now at it's core, the Clips is a
simple automatic point and shoot camera
that's similar looking to a go pro,
but it's considerably smaller.
It has a fixed focus lens, with a 130 degree
wide angle field of view, a single button,
and a few LEDs.
But no display, or user interface of it's own.
It connects to an iPhone, Google Pixel,
or Samsung galaxy S7 or S8
through Bluetooth and WIFI direct,
to download the images it captures,
and control it.
But inside is what supposedly makes the Clips special.
It's running Google's people detection algorithms.
To recognize familiar faces and interesting activity.
And then capture those moments,
that you care about automatically.
But this is a big but, the Clips isn't
recording video or sound, it's technically
shooting a bunch of still images,
at roughly 15 frames per second,
which it then stitches into seven second clips.
From which you can edit or pull stills out of.
It's basically making high resolution GIFS
out of the sequences of images.
Now you can use the big button on the front of the
camera to force a capture, or you can
use the APP on your phone to see what
the camera is viewing, and take shots there.
But the whole point of Clips,
is to let the camera and Google's algorithms
do all of the heavy lifting.
So you can just enjoy your time and then
look at the memories it captures later on.
Now to facilitate this, the Clips
comes with a silicone case, that makes it
easy to prop up almost anywhere,
or yes, you can clip it to things.
But it's not designed to be a body camera.
You're supposed to just set it down
and leave it alone. For the most part.
There are other accessories you can buy.
Like this case that let's you mount the Clips
to a tripod for more positioning options.
But otherwise using the Clips is as simple as
turning it on, and then putting it where you want it.
You can adjust the frequency of captures in Clips APP,
and you can also train it, with people that matter
to you, by linking it with your Google photos account.
The Clips camera's supposed to learn the faces
of important people, by who it's exposed to most often.
But by using the photos data,
it's supposed to speed things along.
You can also push the button on the front of the camera,
to take a direct portrait of someone that you want
the Clips to prioritize.
Now Google takes all of that data,
and then tries to figure out whenever
your kids are in the frame and doing
something interesting or photogenic,
like say, dancing or smiling.
And then automatically capturing a clip.
Now pets work a little differently.
Because Google's camera algorithms,
can't actually tell these individual dog apart.
It basically just looks for any time it
has an animal in the frame, and then,
opens it's shutter.
Now Google stresses, all of this is happening locally
on the Clips camera itself, nothing is happening
in the Cloud, and in fact, the Clips
doesn't even have a way of
connecting to the internet.
Good boy, good boy, good boy.
Now once the camera has captured a bunch of clips,
you use the APP to browse through them on your phone.
You can edit them down to shorter versions,
grab still images out of them,
or just save the whole thing to your
phone storage for sharing and editing later.
The Clips APP is supposed to learn,
based on which clips you save and deem important,
and then prioritize capturing similar clips in the future.
You can also hit a toggle to view
suggested clips for saving, which is
basically what the APP thinks you'll like
out of the clips it has captured.
I've been testing the Clips with my two kids
for the better part of the past week,
and while I appreciate what Google is trying to do here,
I can't say that I'm terribly impressed
or happy with the results.
I'm used to being the one to take the photos in my family,
whether they're candid or posed moments.
Which means it's been very hard to trust
that the Clips camera is gonna do
what I normally do, for example,
I found it wasn't taking shots all that often.
So I tweaked the settings in the APP
to increase it's frequency, but it
still seems to be very conservative with what
it will actually capture.
Google say that the Clips is supposed to let you
not worry about taking photos or videos,
and just let you enjoy your time with your family.
But it also admits, that putting the Clips
in one spot, and leaving it there,
isn't ideal either.
You really have to move it around,
and put it in different places and angles
to get the best results.
Frankly at that point,
I might as well just be using my phone.
Now on top of that, the Clips camera hardware,
just isn't very good. The images it
captures are flat, and grainy,
and often have a lot of motion blur.
Especially indoors, where I'd use it the most.
The 15 frames per second animations
don't really make for smooth video,
and I actually miss the sound from many of the clips.
At the end of the day, there just
really weren't any clips that I felt
were better or more authentic than
I could capture with my phone.
And in most cases the image quality was
bad enough, that I had just wished
I used my phone to begin with.
(digital music)
Now, I'm sure I could get better at using this.
I could use some practice, and get a better idea
of it's ultra-wide angle field of view.
Find the best angles and positions it works for, and so on.
But I'm not convinced that the effort involved here
would be rewarded with really great results.
And that makes it tough to justify
buying and using the Clips camera.
Beyond it's cost, there's also having
to bring it along, make sure it's charged,
and then go through transferring it's images to my phone.
When I could just use the phone I already have
and get better images and video to begin with.
Google's definitely onto something here.
And I hope it's eventually able to
make it easier to capture pictures of
my kids in the future.
But right now,
the Clips just isn't doing it.
(inhaling)
(exhaling)
- Yay! (clapping)
- Oh my God.
- Happy Birthday!
- 9-1-1 somebody.
(laughing)
(exhaling)
(wheezing)
(laughing)
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Google Clips review

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