Great power and compact design, but with problems in implementation
By Zhihao
Rated 3 out of 5
Date: 2026-07-20
Let me start with the upside: This machine is designed for 640 sensor and 25mm lens. If you like the wider field of view for looking around in the forest, but also want some distance recognition by going 640, the design of this device is the lightest and smallest on the market (unless you go buy the module only) , and it takes 18650 battery, with a metal strut and battery bay, plastic shell, so great long term durability while balancing light weight. Great design, at least on the design side. The sensor is impressive and image is very clear, at least on the sensor side. The 1x mode crops the screen while 1.5x and above mode uses the full screen, good thought, at least on the idea side. EIS is effective and rain mode does boost the sensitivity a little. Also, the eye cup can flip forward, great for people wearing glasses (The K3 can't). However, there are tons of lame implementation and quality control issue that made it not able to reach the full potential.
1. The latency: There is significant latency (I measured 140ms) Which makes your two eyes see different things if you mount it on a helmet and have any movement. It is almost impossible to use both eyes to walk, you have to use one eye walking, then stop, and look through the device. You cannot walk while observing at the same time, and this entire experience is dizzying. It's a 50hz sensor so the sensor only takes 20ms in maximum to read the frame, this device got an ultra long image processing pipeline which is not inline with helmet mounting in mind. Despite being marketed as helmet-mountable, I would only use this as a handheld device. Then the weird ergonomics, useable for hand held, is not ideal.
2. Collimation is off, the image is always too high for 2 eyes to overlap. I replaced the device, but the second one had the same issue. This should be an easy software fix, but they didn't do it at the factory, which is beyond me. Nor did they provide the user the option to adjust it.
3. At the 6x magnification, the image sharpening is way too high. It actually makes this 640 device look like a 384 device, Soft and blocky. There is AI super resolution involved, but it seems like the AI super resolution is trying on an already over sharpened image. Does the engineer really understand image processing?
4. Buttons: So they decide to make a tactile button that makes clicky sounds when being pressed, great. But when the button is being pressed to the "click" sound, it might not trigger, you have to press harder. This happened on the power button for the first device, and on both the middle and power buttons for the second device I received. It makes the user experience frustrating sometimes. This is a pure QC issue, buttons are not high tech stuff, by using a better tactile switch the cost would only increase $0.5 out of this $2000 device. Another thing I noticed is there is audible electrical noise in zoomed-in modes, sometimes.Those makes me lose confidence in the materials used in the electrical components. The lens and sensor are pretty good though.
5. Despite suggesting vehicle mounting in the use case, when I asked them directly, they said no vibration testing has been done and vehicle mounting not recommended.
5. App issues: The wifi does not work reliably for my iPhone, the live stream only works when I turn off the cellular data. The photo playback was done very poorly, with no thumbnail, no swipe between images, it's a painful guess work to find the image I want. This device has strong positives, and strong.
6. Finicky focus ring. The lens focus on the first device is extremely hard and slippery to turn. It even makes my finger painful after I used it for a while. The second device is a bit more lubricated, but still too resistant to turn. Another issue is sometimes when you want to turn focus in one direction, the lens focus actually goes the other direction before goes to the direction you want. You can get used to this, but it would still make focusing slower.
Summery: The idea and overall design of this device is great, but when it comes down to implementation, it's not. There is no alternative to this product on the market for such a compact and powerful device, that made me almost wanted to live with it. I hope those issues would be resolved in a later production batch, and the software improved. With 640 device coming to $1500 price range, this one carries a premium for it's design and we should expect the quality is also on par.
