Oho Sunshine Camera Glasses review: shades of the Mission Impossible movie

Oho Sunshine is a Chinese manufacturer of sunglasses with a difference. The range includes audio sunglasses that pair with your mobile phone via Bluetooth, and camera glasses that shoot video and stills as you go about your daily life. Naturally, they offer a hands-free advantage compared with shooting with a conventional camera, and the company now also offers a set of skiing goggles for winter sports. I’m reviewing the camera glasses here, which come in options of Full HD or 4K UHD, along with various capacities for the internal memory storage. The different camera glasses all work in the same way, however, and have the same look and feel.

Oho Sunshine Camera Glasses: Specifications

Oho Sunshine Camera Glasses: Price

Prices for the Oho Sunshine Camera Glasses start at around $60/£50. For that, you get the Full HD 1080p sunglasses with a single set of dark lenses, and a 32GB memory card built in. The same glasses with blue lenses cost a little more, at about $70/£66. The 4K UHD version of the glasses look essentially the same but start at $118/£115 with black lenses and 32GB of memory. They work their way up to around £300/$249 for the set that has a 512GB memory card and various options come complete with multiple interchangeable lenses of black, blue, clear and gold in color. At least, that was the variety of options available when I wrote this review, but specifications and configurations seem to be changing at a very frequent rate!

Oho Sunshine Camera Glasses: Design & Handling

Advertised as being made from ‘TR90’ technical material, the frames of the glasses have a pleasant and slightly rubberized feel and texture. The hinges work smoothly and efficiently, with click stops in the open position for when you’re wearing them. Naturally, different people have different sized heads but for me, with my ‘medium’ head, the glasses felt comfortable with a secure fit. There proved to have a well-fitting support over the bridge of the nose, and over the ears with neither too much nor too little pressure.

The dark lenses have a neutral gray tint and are advertised as offering UV400 protection, as well as being polarized to cut glare. Naturally, it’s only the interchangeable eye lenses that are dark, or blue, or yellow. The lens of the camera is clear in all cases. The lenses that you look through with your eyes are claimed to be highly impact-resistant, for enhanced protection.

The camera lens is positioned right where you’d expect it to be, facing forward from the section of the frame that fits above your nose. Although small, the lens is made from six ‘HD’ elements. The electronics that support the lens fit into a sealed compartment in the right hand arm of the glasses. As well as all the processing components, this section includes the single pushbutton for turning the glasses on or off and starting or stopping video capture in the process. To take a still image, you need to tap the button once to stop video recording, then tap it again to take a photo. Double-tapping the button gets you back from stills into video capture.

Small LED indicator lamps are built into the backside of the front of the frame. A blinking red light indicates that video recording is in progress. A blue pulse of light indicates capture of a still image. There’s also a red indicator lamp for charging, which illuminates red while the glasses’ Li-ion battery is charging and extinguishes when they’re fully charged.

Memory is described as ‘internal’, as is the Li-ion battery, but is based on a regular SD/HC/XC card. You just can’t get at the memory card without disassembling the glasses, which I wouldn’t recommend. Other points of interest in the arm of the glasses include a small hole that plays host to a microphone for recording an audio track with your video, and a recess for prodding with a pin, which applies a factory reset.

Oho Sunshine Camera Glasses: Performance

With a single operating button, it sounds like the Oho Sunshine Camera Glasses should be incredibly straightforward and easy to use. In a way, operation is arguably too easy. The thumb of my right hand had an uncanny knack of finding and pressing the on/off, start/stop button when handling the glasses and putting them on, until muscle memory took over and I managed to only press the button when I actually wanted to. Even so, I found it a pain that if I wanted to take a photo, I’d have to turn on the glasses and start recording video, then stop the video and swap to stills mode. Let’s just say that video capture is definitely the default mode for these glasses.

Running time on a fully charged battery is stated as up to 60 minutes for the Full HD glasses, and 30 minutes for the UHD 4K glasses. Both versions can also be charged or run from a power bank, connected to its USB-C port. Video quality is reasonable at best. It’s certainly better than you’d get from the average pair of sunglasses, if not a match for ‘proper’ digital cameras. I’d say it’s on a par with the kind of quality I’d expect from a dashcam. 

One thing I personally struggled with was that, without a viewfinder or preview screen as a frame of reference, I found it almost impossible to keep my head (and therefore the glasses) level while walking about and generally moving around. Evidence of this can be seen below, in the example video…

Above: Sample video shot with the Oho camera glasses

Stills quality is pretty mediocre. Some of the glasses in the Oho Sunshine catalog are advertised as delivering 15 megapixel stills, whereas both of the 1080p and 4K versions of the glasses that I tried offer 24 megapixel images. It looks like a fairly large amount of interpolation is required to achieve these 24MP stills. They have that fuzzy and indistinct look that you get from most cheap digital cameras, where interpolation is trying to best guess what’s in between the pixels that the image sensor can actually ‘see’.

There are quite a few options for shooting both stills and video. The 4K UHD glasses that I tried first failed to capture any video at all, and all of its JPEG stills were corrupted. The replacement Full HD 1080p glasses that did work offered options for video sizes of 1620P30/1440P30/1080P50/1080P30/720P50/720P30, with segment times of  5/10/15/20/30 minutes. You can also select still image sizes of 24M/20M/16M/13M/8M and choose whether to have a date & time watermark. Other setup options include reformatting the memory, selecting motor vibration feedback and recording video with or without an audio track.

The only real problem with making any changes to the options is that there’s no way of applying changes using just the glasses on their own. That’s mainly because there’s no playback screen, so it’s equally impossible to see the results of your video or photo capture until you’re able to plug the glasses into a TV or computer via its USB port. Similarly, to make any changes to the setup or options, you need to make manual adjustments to a ‘config.txt’ file stored in the memory of the glasses, using a plain text editor on a computer, unless you lash one up on your mobile phone via a USB link. It feels a very antiquated way of doing things. 

I’d much rather see a proper menu system included that you can run from a computer or, better still, from a companion app that you can run on your mobile phone via a Bluetooth connection.

Oho Sunshine Camera Glasses: Sample Images

This gallery of example stills was shot with the Oho Sunshine Camera Glasses at the floating harbour of Bristol Docks in the UK

Image 1 of 8

Oho Sunshine Camera Glasses: Verdict

I find it a bit hard to take the Oho Sunshine Camera Glasses seriously. I feel they’re more of a gimmick than a proper piece of kit. They look fairly stylish and are comfortable to wear, and do serve a practical purpose of keeping the sun out my eyes. Apart from that, they’re more a bit of fun for shooting video on the fly, or snapping a few stills. Quality is just about passable for both video and stills so, again, these glasses are really for having fun rather than serious video and photographic pursuits.

Alternatives

Developed by Facebook, Ray-Ban Stories are smart glasses that include built-in audio and dual-lens camera recording, all wrapped up in a typically stylish selection from the iconic sunglasses brand.

According to the manufacturer, Solos AirGo Vision AI Glasses offer “seamless interaction with ChatGPT, engaging in natural conversations without the hassle of typing,” and come complete with a built-in camera.