Police Product Test: Eye of Mine HD Video Camera Sunglasses
Recently I was lucky enough to get to put the new Eye of Mine Eye-View 720HD camera sunglasses through their paces. These glasses come with interchangeable clear and polarized grey lenses that have a high-definition video camera built into the bridge of the nose.
The overall design was very well done. The glasses look almost identical to my regular sport sunglasses and fit comfortably. The construction feels solid and they have a matte black, rubberized finish. They’re not heavy or overly bulky and, most importantly to cops, it isn’t glaringly obvious there’s a camera in them. The company’s done a nice job of hiding a lot of technology in a small package.
Now down to the nuts and bolts. The company claims the camera’s battery life to be two hours and I don’t dispute that. I was evidently too eager to download my footage and never let it run down that far. There’s a removable Micro SD card to record video footage, and the glasses include a USB cable to both download video to a computer (viewable with QuickTime) and recharge the battery. Since most computers, including laptops in patrol cars, have this free application there is no complicated, proprietary program to install. This makes using these glasses about as easy as using a USB thumb drive. I give them a big thumbs up.
Operating the Eye-View’s camera is quite easy; there’s one large silver button on the right side that begins and ends recording and each segment is saved as a separate file with a date and time stamp, much like a voice recorder. There’s also a small blue light on the inside of the frames that tells you when recording is in progress. This is nice but requires the user to take the glasses off to see the light and verify the camera is actively recording. And in a police environment, most times we would prefer not to give away the fact that we’re recording. A quiet but audible tone would be better.
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