EE 4GEE Capture Cam review – 4G life-logging

Livestreaming

To use livestreaming, you’ll have to install the separate Skeegle app and register for an account using Facebook. You can also create circles of friends through the Skeegle app, either from your contacts list or from Facebook. These people are then sent a notification to view your stream when you begin livestreaming. The good thing is that they don’t need to install Skeegle to view, as the livestream will play through a browser. This works on both desktop and mobile.

During my testing, livestreaming at its maximum resolution and frame rate saw the Capture Cam goes through about 14.7MB every minute. Unfortunately, the stability of livestreams was incredibly hit and miss. The quality will obviously greatly depend on the strength of your 4G signal, but when I tried it out for myself, streams would either be very stuttery or sometimes stop altogether, which proved incredibly frustrating. 

It’s also worth noting that, unlike local video, which can be recorded at 1080p and 30fps, livestreaming limits you to 720p, 30fps. This shouldn’t really come as any surprise as livestreaming video requires a significant amount of bandwidth and data, but those after high-quality livestreams will need to look elsewhere.

Interestingly, since the Skeegle app works independently of the Capture Cam, you can actually use your smartphone’s camera to broadcast a livestream instead. When I tried this method, essentially using the 4GEE Capture Cam as a Wi-Fi hotspot, I saw some perfectly watchable streams. This indicates that the unstable livestreaming was a problem with the Capture Cam and not EE’s 4G signal, which should come as some, albeit small, consolation to the network provider. 

When livestreaming, a Replay version is saved that can be played back at a later date. However, many of my recordings ended up being taken down and marked as ‘violent/offensive’. These were test videos in the office where absolutely nothing of interest happened at all, so their removal was puzzling.

In theory, though, Skeegle currently has no limit on the number of Replays that can be saved to your account, but this might change in the future. The Capture Cam can be set to record a version locally when livestreaming, so it’s perhaps sensible not to rely on the online backup for anything important.

Video quality and Battery Life

The 720p livestream video, while occasionally jerky, also displayed artefacting and a general softness, no doubt a result of compression to allow for livestreaming in the first place. However, even the locally saved 1080p video was unremarkable, as there was lots of noise even in good outdoor lighting. Colours were also very dark and had an unnatural warmth to them and lacked shadow detail. 

Unsurprisingly, without any image stabilisation present, you end up with some pretty shaky footage when the camera’s clipped on to an item of clothing, so much so that walking footage becomes almost nausea-inducing. It’s not so bad when you stand still but at this point there’s nothing to stop you from just livestreaming from a handheld smartphone, negating the Capture Cam’s practicality. Image quality all round was disappointing.

The 8-megapixel still images outdoors were marginally better, with lots of contrast in each image and reasonable colour saturation. However, they were still no better than you can expect from an average smartphone. 

Recording 1080p video, you can expect about 1 hour 39 minutes, which isn’t too bad, but pales in comparison to the 4GEE Action Cam’s three hours. 

Conclusion

You can understand why the Capture Cam isn’t available without an EE contract, as it’s arguably more dependent on constant data access than the Action Cam. However, given the quality of the footage, I can’t see a lot of people wanting to sign up to a new contract purely for a camera.

It would have been better if the Capture Cam was available without a contract so you could swap in your phone’s SIM or use your connected smartphone’s data connection, but then EE wouldn’t be able to sell you another contract. Aside from the convenient wearable form factor, you’d be better off simply using the Skeegle app with your smartphone’s camera, saving yourself a lot of money in the long run.