Photographs, not video

It takes 4K photographs. It takes five-second clips. And you can set it on your phone to take one frame every three seconds and string them into a film on their own. It does not shoot long video.

That is not a feature cut. It is an innovative piece of product thinking.

Continuous video is a bad form on a pair of glasses

Three problems, and each one alone is bad enough.

It shakes the whole time. Your head rises and falls continuously while you walk. Stabilisation rescues some of that and cannot rescue all of it. Ten minutes of footage shot from a pair of glasses and you are queasy two minutes in.

It is too big. 4K at thirty frames is one to two GB for five minutes. That means more storage, a bigger battery, and heat to deal with — and those three are the most expensive space there is on a pair of glasses.

Nobody watches it twice. An hour of walking around outdoors recorded as an hour of video is an hour of material you will never open again.

Interval shooting solves all three at once

One frame every three seconds is twenty frames a minute. What you come home with is a short film with a rhythm to it, not a running account.

The shake is gone — every frame is an independent still image, and the phone aligns them afterwards, which is steadier than continuous footage can be. Storage falls to a fifth, and power falls further still: between two frames the chip can go back to deep sleep, where continuous encoding is three hundred milliwatts without a break.

And it does the selecting for you. An hour compressed into thirty seconds is an hour you do not have to spend cutting.

Where the saving went

With no 4K video, storage drops from thirty-odd GB to a few, and the battery does not have to grow to feed a continuous encoder. Both of those savings went into the sensor and the lens.

This is one trade we are happy to spell out: you lose a feature most people would not use a second time, and you gain a camera that takes a better picture.

A limit is not a regret. Choose the right limit and it becomes the shape.