Autographer review

A DIFFERENT KIND OF IMAGE

The Autographer has a custom-made 136 degree angle lens, giving a light fish-eye effect on the resulting images. Focus is fixed and it captures 5-megapixel images – there are no quality settings.

There is a manual shutter button of sorts, which then shoots a ‘burst’ of 9 shots over 9 seconds. This makes sure you capture moments you don’t want to miss.

The wide-angle lens is a great inclusion and captures your surroundings in ways a standard camera never could

The kind of images you get are very different from those you’d frame with a handheld camera, in fact your first response may be just how poor they are judged by typical photo criteria. However, once you recalibrate your critical judgement you realise it produces some real gems; capturing genuinely natural, unforced moments, and often placing you within them, with your hands and other objects taking centre stage. It takes images of incidental moments that you might otherwise have forgotten, but bring a smile to your face nonetheless.

This charming lady took the time to find me just the right ice cold drink on a hot summer’s day, thank you once again

We got a lot of images that were off-kilter, and though this has a certain charm, we’d have liked the software to autocorrect such images, or a tool in the software to let you correct them yourself.

We loved getting action shots like this one of me clumsily vaulting a gate …

… before enjoying some lunch in a field, the Autographer often puts you in the picture

Technically the images aren’t great. Colours are garish, the exposure struggles with very bright or shady conditions, focus is sometimes soft and shutter speeds occasionally struggle to keep up with the action. That said, it does a fair job given its size and the fact it has to deal with your unpredictable motion.

SHARING PLATTERS

Pressing the menu button makes a OLED display glow through the front of the device, and using two buttons you can access some basic functions like the shooting rate. Bluetooth is built-in and you can link it to an iOS app (no Android app yet unfortunately) for reviewing and sharing images on the go. It’s a nice extra but not essential, as the whole point of the device is that you don’t need to worry about photos.

In that respect it’s a very odd thing, for those who love to take and share photos on the go, with witty captions and instagram-styled filters, this simply won’t be interactive enough to entertain them. Plus these images are less-staged, more personal in a way, and so less suitable for sharing with all and sundry.

Rather than you actively thinking about an audience and capturing an image for them, it takes photography out of your hands and out of your mind. It lets you get on with actually doing things, rather than recording them.

The results are so different from framed snaps, that the vast majority of people, and especially those keen on photography, would still feel a need to take traditional photos in addition. So is it for those who don’t want to be bothered by taking photos, or for those so keen on photography that no amount of photos is enough?

If you’re already a keen photographer then expect to see lots of images like this one

Even at the new reduced price of £299 it’s hard to see that anyone but the keenest image-collectors is going to be bothered, but then they’ll find themselves with a lot of photos of the back of their ‘main’ camera, as we did. At half the price, or less even, it would be an intriguing device that many might buy out of sheer curiosity.

At its current price only those who are pathologically-driven to capture every moment of their existence need apply. We can’t see this first model being hugely successful then, but it’s certainly a big step forward on an interesting journey, one that may eventually change the way we think about photography itself.