The Geek Squad

Narrative Clip Unboxing and Initial Review

After a year long wait, the Narrative Clips are finally out. Originally called Memoto and funded through a very successful Kickstarter campaign, the Narrative Clip has been a project that I have followed with great anticipation, so being one of the first to get a Narrative Clip is a great privilege.

The Narrative Clip is a wearable camera that takes photos every 30 seconds whilst there is enough light. So, to turn it off, you just unclip and place it in your pocket. To start automatically taking photos, you just clip it onto yourself and away you go.

You can take an extra photograph at any time by double tapping the camera.

So, after one days use, what thoughts do I have?

It looks like it will take a bit of trial and error to find the right place to clip on Narrative. I'm finding that the choices I have made so far are too low, even though it is around the collar. The problem is that what I see at eye level and think is a well framed scene, comes out too low and it is as though I have cropped the top of the scene off. Obviously, this is for close shots, for scenes further away, this isn't a problem.

What is a problem is that I seem to get a lot of blurred shots. It doesn't help that on day one of use it was grey and raining (it's England, what can I say?) and that I took a lot of indoor scenes that were badly lit. Now, the Narrative software automatically skips blurred shots and badly lit photos, so when you review them in the Narrative app on your iPhone, it looks pretty good.

On the whole, I'm quite happy, I'm sure that I will get used to using the Narrative Clip and my scenes (or 'Moments' as Narrative call them) will get better.

Suggested improvements.

I found that when I went to double tap, I would touch the clip first (so I knew where was) and then do the double tap. I would then consciously adjust my body position to 'frame' the scene. I suspect either or both of these might be the cause of some of my blurred shots.

My suggestion would be to have the same double tap functionality which immediately takes a photo, but then a second photo is taken 5 seconds later (to accommodate adjusting my body position) and then another photo 15 seconds after the originally double tap.

I've not mentioned the upload process of the photos to the narrative servers, but I would like to have an intermediary step which allows me to preview the photos and to manually skip selected photos.

There are potentially a large number of photos going to be uploaded and I may not have the bandwidth to have all the sub-par photos uploaded. I might also want to just remove some bad shots. I almost forgot to put the Clip into my pocket when I went to the toilet....

Finally, I took some photos with my phone and I would like to be able to add them into the stream of photos to complete the 'Moment'.

So far, so good and I'm looking forward to using my Narrative Clip as I believe it is the first truly wearable and useable camera.

If you are interested in the Narrative Clip, go visit the Narrative website: http://getnarrative.com