DV Spy Glasses product reviews

Doing reviews sometimes involves doing a bit of "mystery shopping" to see how stores, agents, or service-providers stack up. There's no "paypacket" riding on the accuracy of the data, but sometimes it pays to have a record of what went down to make sure you have the right story. The difference between a "good" score and a "job-killer score" can sometimes be the hearing, or not, of a few key words. To avoid stuffing it up, I have taken to turning on my phone's "voice dictation" function before entering a store... but sometimes that's not enough.

That's where these babies come in. Discrete enough that unless the store team member takes a close look, they appear to be just a slightly bulgy set of glasses, these can record both audio and video, giving you the opportunity to look back and see what you had been looking at, and not be standing there trying to quietly but clearly mumble voice notes to yourself for later use. It's a dead giveaway to the staff person, trust me. I used to be on that end of the transaction, and it was VERY easy to spot a Mystery Shopper with a lousy short-term memory.

But that's not all, these are great for the kids to run around with, so you have some awesome footage for the family holiday DVD or YouTube channel, or how about a set for Dad when he's out hunting... did he REALLY "...just miss a clean shot on a 14-pointer..." or was it just a dead tree branch in the shadows? As a Cub Scout leader, these are also ideal for us when we take the kids out on walks and to events, as it gives us a clean record of what went on in case of incident, or just to include in the Group archives or online video diary. (Perfect for Jamborees and Camps too!)

As part of the test run, I used these to shoot some footage as I wandered around the Armageddon Auckland event today... and upon returning home and checking the footage I was actually quite impressed. Sure, it's not 1080p HD quality - it's a slightly non-standard VGA 720x480 after all - and the sound is a little fuzzy due to the microphone being buried in the plastic frame, but for what you are getting it is actually a pretty decent camera that is discrete and VERY easy to use - just point your face at the target and away you go.

You also have the ability to snap off still shots at a more respectable 1.3 megapixels - 1280x1024 is a pretty standard non-widescreen desktop wallpaper, and quite detailed enough to print off as a hardcopy photo at your nearest photocentre or camera shop.

Overall, are these worth the price? Yup, I'd say it's worth a go. There's a lot of legitimate potential in these, and since you can apparently upgrade the firmware - if the humerously-badly-translated instruction sheet can be trusted - there is even room for added software features. You won't get better resolution or sound - they are hardware issues - but you could see better compression, better memory management, and other 'cosmetic' features in the future. An added bonus is that when connected to your PC with the supplied USB 2.0 cable, these act like a USB pendrive too! Very discrete digital storage of up to 32gb of data!

Available at Armageddon Auckland until Monday 22nd October 2012 for the special price of $99.00!