Xiaomo AI AI Camera

Hel­lo, friends

The gad­get that I will talk about is rather unusu­al and it is dif­fi­cult to clear­ly clas­si­fy it. In fact, this is a minia­ture pho­to / video cam­era with arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence and very good image qual­i­ty, but at the same time very inter­est­ing fea­tures.

Where can I buy ?

Gearbest Bang­good Aliex­press JD.ru

Table (updat­ed) on the Xiao­mi ecosys­tem

Package

The cam­era is deliv­ered in a white box made of thick card­board, typ­i­cal for ecosys­tem devices, with­out bright print­ing, all inscrip­tions and pho­tographs are made in grayscale. Only the left cor­ner of the box stands out as a bright spot.

On the back, the main para­me­ters of the cam­era are list­ed, I will talk about them even fur­ther in the review, but I will name the main ones — a 10 MP cam­era, with a focal length of 28 mm, an aper­ture of F / 2.2 and an angle of 76 degrees, a 910 mAh bat­tery and dual-band wi-fi, although for some rea­son only 2.4 GHz is indi­cat­ed on the box.

At the ends there are pic­tograms sym­bol­iz­ing the func­tions of the cam­era, but let’s bet­ter see every­thing, so to speak, in kind.

What is in the box

Every­thing is packed sound­ly and com­pe­tent­ly, except for the thick card­board from which the box is made, there is an addi­tion­al foam insert inside, a large soft insert pro­tects the cam­era from the sides. You don’t have to wor­ry about ship­ping.

Under the tab with the cam­era is anoth­er box that con­tains all the nec­es­sary acces­sories for the cam­era. In addi­tion to the cam­era, a cable for charg­ing and trans­fer­ring data from USB to micro USB and a spare round stick­er made of dou­ble-sided tape for attach­ing the cam­era stand are includ­ed.

Appearance

Exter­nal­ly, the cam­era is most sim­i­lar to a reg­u­lar web or ip cam­era, though with an unchar­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly large lens. The shape of the case is a square with round­ed edges and a pro­trud­ing part with a lens. The cam­era is very minia­ture, which can be seen on this large-scale slide — where is it in com­par­i­son with an ordi­nary match­box.

On the top of the cam­era is a sin­gle but­ton with which all con­trol is exer­cised. By hold­ing the but­ton for 2 sec­onds — turn it on, then with a short press — take a pic­ture, by press­ing it again for 2 sec­onds — we send it back to sleep mode. Near the but­ton there is a hole for the micro­phone, it is only one, but the cam­era records stereo sound — appar­ent­ly the same for two chan­nels.

The back of the cam­era is remov­able, with a mag­net­ic base. In order to make it easy to remove it, there is a spe­cial lever on the bot­tom of the cam­era. On the inside of the stand — there is a round of dou­ble-sided tape, a spare — as I said — is includ­ed. It is reusable as the descrip­tion says. On the back of the cam­era, the pow­er set­tings are writ­ten, and there is a com­part­ment cov­er with a mem­o­ry card and micro USB.

The stand, in the form of adhe­sive tape, also has a mag­net­ic base that allows you not only to quick­ly remove and install the cam­era, but also attach­es to a met­al sur­face. The inside, the flat side of the stand, is for sur­face mount­ing, while the out­side, con­vex, is for attach­ing the cam­era.

The cov­er on the cam­era is removed quite tight­ly and is con­nect­ed to the body. Below it, as I said, is a micro USB port for charg­ing the cam­era bat­tery and trans­fer­ring data, a micro SD card slot — the max­i­mum sup­port­ed vol­ume is up to 32 GB.

Fastening

An exam­ple of fas­ten­ing to a hor­i­zon­tal met­al sur­face, adhe­sive tape was not used here — the strength of the mag­net is suf­fi­cient. The cam­era, in turn, is held with a mag­net on a stand, and it can­not be fixed direct­ly to a met­al sur­face, just such a bulge as on a stand is need­ed.

The func­tions of the stand do not end there. The groove on the out­er side is designed for ver­ti­cal instal­la­tion of the cam­era, for exam­ple on a table. There is also some­thing on the bot­tom of the cam­era that is mag­net­ic and allows it to stand con­fi­dent­ly on the stand.

What’s more, the cam­era can be tilt­ed up and down at dif­fer­ent angles. The cam­era is secure­ly fixed and does not show any incli­na­tions to inde­pen­dent change of posi­tion.

Application

To con­trol the cam­era, you need to install the Xiao­mo app. The appli­ca­tion is part­ly in Eng­lish, part­ly in Chi­nese. Par­tial trans­la­tion leaves hope that it will be final­ly trans­lat­ed, at least into Eng­lish.

To con­nect to the cam­era, you need to turn it on by press­ing and hold­ing the but­ton on it for about 2 sec­onds. Then, through the appli­ca­tion or through the stan­dard wi-fi set­tings, find a net­work called mo_****** where at the end are the last 6 dig­its of the ser­i­al num­ber from the box and con­nect to it using the pass­word 00000000.

The main win­dow of the appli­ca­tion con­tains but­tons for view­ing the record­ed mate­r­i­al — Local Album — divid­ed into two tabs, the cam­er­a’s local stor­age and an exter­nal micro SD card. By click­ing on any pho­to or video, you can view it or down­load it to your phone.

By click­ing on the Spec­i­fi­ca­tion but­ton, for some rea­son, an instruc­tion is launched, in Eng­lish. Quite detailed and under­stand­able, at the end, by the way, it con­tains a prod­uct spec­i­fi­ca­tion, and is gen­er­al­ly rec­om­mend­ed for read­ing.

For exam­ple, here in the pic­tures it is shown how to use the mag­net­ic back as a stand for mount­ing the cam­era at dif­fer­ent angles. User Man­u­al tab — has sev­er­al items in Chi­nese, so it has no spe­cial val­ue until the moment of trans­la­tion. The fourth square but­ton leads to the ques­tions and answers sec­tion, every­thing is rather banal, but you can look.

We turn to the cam­era con­trol, to switch to this mode, you need to press the low­est but­ton. Every­thing here is in Chi­nese, which is sad. The cam­era has 4 shoot­ing modes, by default it is in the third — tak­ing a pho­to. In the upper part there are 4 icons — exit, beau­ti­ful face mode, con­stant light — with bright­ness con­trol, flash — you can force turn on, turn off or auto mode, set­tings menu. Next comes the ges­ture recog­ni­tion mode icon, HDR mode. Even low­er — access to the cam­era gallery, cam­era release, shoot­ing timer. Even low­er are the cam­era modes.

The first mode is con­tin­u­ous shoot­ing with an inter­val — for exam­ple, 9 shots at an inter­val of 3 sec­onds, the total shoot­ing time is 27 sec­onds. The inter­val can be increased, which will also increase the shoot­ing time. The sec­ond mode — 16 shots and the third mode — man­u­al — where you can spec­i­fy the inter­val between shots and the total dura­tion of the shoot­ing.

The sec­ond mode is an instant con­tin­u­ous shoot­ing of 5 frames. There can be 1 series or three series of 5 frames. Con­ve­nient­ly, when delet­ing, you do not need to delete pic­tures one at a time — the entire series of pic­tures is delet­ed at once.

The fourth mode is video record­ing, videos last­ing from 20 sec­onds to 5 min­utes.

The menu that is called by press­ing the top right but­ton is also all in Chi­nese. At the begin­ning, there is infor­ma­tion about the free space on the cam­era — a total of a mem­o­ry card and inter­nal stor­age, charge sta­tus. Enable ges­ture recog­ni­tion in offline mode — palm and V with two fin­gers, and for the lat­ter you can choose to take a pic­ture or record a video. Then there are 2 points that are not very applic­a­ble because of the lan­guage — help and tips for shoot­ing. Next are the cam­era set­tings, the tran­si­tion time to sleep mode is 5 or 10 min­utes, the inclu­sion of 5 GHz wi-fi mode, then the light­ing effects when shoot­ing.

On the next page of the menu are options for print­ing a water­mark, auto­mat­i­cal­ly delet­ing pho­tos when uploaded to the phone, noti­fi­ca­tion mode, firmware update, and an exper­i­men­tal smile detec­tion option. Activ­i­ty noti­fi­ca­tions can be either turned off, or received as sound, vibra­tion, or both sound and vibra­tion. And final­ly, the ver­sion of the appli­ca­tion.

Connecting to a computer

The cam­era con­nects to the com­put­er using a USB cable — Micro USB, defined as a cam­era — with an inter­nal stor­age on which a lit­tle more than 5 GB is free, and, if installed, a mem­o­ry card.

The para­me­ters of pho­tos in jpg for­mat are 2592 * 4608 pix­els, aspect ratio 16/9, 24 bit col­or depth. Pho­tos take from 3 to 6 megabytes. Video — 1280 * 720 30 frames per sec­ond, with a stream of 9000 kbps and stereo sound

Shooting

First of all, it should be not­ed that the cam­era is focused on ver­ti­cal shoot­ing. Of course, you can sim­ply turn it on its side, but the result­ing mate­r­i­al will still retain its ver­ti­cal ori­en­ta­tion and will have to be flipped pro­gram­mat­i­cal­ly. And in prin­ci­ple, in essence, this is a cam­era for self­ie lovers, and it should be not­ed that the qual­i­ty of the pic­tures will be much high­er than even that of expen­sive smart­phones.

You can bring beau­ty with the help of the option — a beau­ti­ful face, which comes down to evening out com­plex­ion, elim­i­nat­ing skin defects. Of course, I am not a fash­ion mod­el, but you can eval­u­ate the result by my phys­iog­no­my. At the same time, the detail­ing of the back­ground is not affect­ed exter­nal­ly, that is, the fil­ter is applied specif­i­cal­ly to the face.

In my opin­ion, the imple­men­ta­tion is quite suc­cess­ful, bet­ter than in many appli­ca­tions for shoot­ing on smart­phone cam­eras.

Shoot­ing in land­scape mode — the pho­to had to be flipped, but it’s not as trou­ble­some as flip­ping the video. A sen­sor that tracks the posi­tion of this gad­get would not hurt.

The col­or ren­di­tion and detail­ing is very good, not every smart­phone can do it as well, I hope every­one under­stands that the qual­i­ty of the pic­tures does not depend sole­ly on the num­ber of megapix­els.

HDR mode — in prin­ci­ple, as for self-cut­ting, it is not par­tic­u­lar­ly need­ed, but since it is, here is the result. Work­ing in this mode takes a lit­tle more time to process the image, it does not require pro­longed immo­bil­i­ty when shoot­ing, but it works out the frame bet­ter, aligns and refresh­es the col­ors.

A back­lit shot is when the lens is point­ed at a light source. Usu­al­ly the cam­eras are com­plete­ly blind in this case, one bright spot in the pic­ture is sur­round­ed by dark spots, and the hero of the review, in prin­ci­ple, did a good job here.

Anoth­er exam­ple of shoot­ing is on a cloudy fog­gy day. In my opin­ion, the cam­era can be used as an addi­tion­al or back­up cam­era for street shoot­ing, of course, of an ama­teur lev­el.

Con­tin­u­ous shoot­ing — these three shots show how the posi­tion of a mov­ing car in the back­ground changes. Speed ​​— 50 kilo­me­ters per hour.

Sam­ple self­ie pho­tos indoors. I like the detail, ordi­nary smart­phone self­ie cam­eras are not capa­ble of this. Feels like a flash

Pho­tos tak­en almost simul­ta­ne­ous­ly under the same con­di­tions — with­out flash and with flash.

You can see exam­ples of video shoot­ing in the video ver­sion of the review … Sta­bi­liza­tion is not pro­vid­ed in the cam­era, the video is record­ed in ver­ti­cal ori­en­ta­tion, but many play­ers can rec­og­nize and flip auto­mat­i­cal­ly.

As for the ges­ture con­trol. The cam­era rec­og­nizes two ges­tures — a “goat” or the let­ter V with fin­gers or an open palm, which must then be clenched into a fist. The cam­era notices your ges­ture, and con­firms that the low­er half of the ring under the lens lights up. If you show your palm — after that you need to clench it into a fist, if you show a goat — just hold it for anoth­er sec­ond. After that, a three-sec­ond timer starts and the cam­era takes a pic­ture. A demon­stra­tion of this process is also in the video ver­sion of the review.

Shoot­ing can also be done by press­ing the but­ton — in this case, the timer does not work, it only works in the appli­ca­tion or by ges­tures. Option­al­ly, you can set up a palm ges­ture to take a pho­to, and “Vic­to­ria” to shoot a video, and get a kind of auto­mat­ic home self­ie cut­ter, which will prob­a­bly come in handy for Insta­gram lovers.

Video version

conclusions

In gen­er­al, this is a stand-alone, com­pact and quite advanced cam­era that can take on itself, if not all, then at least part of the shoot­ing that is usu­al­ly done by a smart­phone, and the qual­i­ty of the shoot­ing will be at the lev­el of expen­sive top smart­phones.

Just in case, I’ll say that as a web­cam or IP cam­era, the hero of the review does not work, it does not con­nect to MiHome, Skype does not work. When the smart­phone is con­nect­ed to the wi-fi access point of the cam­era, the Inter­net does not work on it.

Thank you for your atten­tion