The feature that has been advertised most about Google Glass so far has been how easily you can take pictures or record video, and do it from your own perspective, which makes for wonderful recorded memories that you can access years later. However, so far I haven’t been very impressed with its picture taking abilities, and I’ve been especially disappointed in its video recording quality.
It seems the first part, at least, has been greatly improved with a recent XE6 update, which seems to not only improve the quality of the pictures a lot, but they also have much better low-light performance, too. In fact, the low-light performance reminds me a little bit of these great low-light performers such as the HTC One. Of course, it’s still nowhere close to that, but I find it pretty amazing what they’ve managed to do with only a software upgrade, on a camera that was probably never meant to be as good as the one in the HTC One.
The pictures actually look passable when taken in low-light environments now:
The update brought HDR, which is useful when you’re taking an image that has too much light in one part of the frame. With HDR, it’s basically taking 2 or 3 pictures quickly of the same thing, and then “normalizes” it to look better:
The new picture taking improvements look great, but one of the things that disappointed me about Google Glass is how easy it is to record shaky videos. When you’re filming with the camera on your head, it’s going to move and shake a lot more than when you keep a phone in your hands to record stuff, because it’s much harder to keep the head still. Plus, you’re supposed to record stuff from your own perspective, and that implies you’re actually doing something, not standing still.
Youtube may be great at eliminating shaking from videos, but maybe not everyone wants to put their videos on Youtube. It would be much better to add a good Optical Image Stabilizer to it, one even better than the HTC One has, and then you should be able to take very smooth videos even if you move a lot with the Glass.
Hopefully, Google will be upgrading the consumer version of Google Glass with new components by the time it’s coming out next year (new more efficient processor, better camera, bigger battery, thinner display, etc).
via Google Plus, Glass pics