The Eyemore S1 was supposed to be the next big thing in mobile filmmaking. Instead, it’s one of the worst video cameras I’ve ever tested. 

Normally, when a product doesn’t live up to consumers’ expectations, it’s a bad thing. In the case of the Eyemore S1, though, it’s so bad that it’s actually entertaining. 

We started working a review of this camera a few days ago, and we began by filming some test clips with it. The footage was horrible. Even at the lowest ISO settings with plenty of ambient light, the footage looked like it was being shot at the maximum ISO on any other camera. To make things worse, the footage was constantly glitching with colored bands flickering across the frame. 

We emailed Eyemore and told them that they probably don’t want us to review this camera, because the footage was unusable. Surprisingly, they responded and said that we shouldn’t be comparing it to the GH5 (even though they do in their promo) and they did want us to review it as long as we talked about all of its features. 

The main thing that Eyemore wants you to know is that you can record video footage directly to your smartphone, which makes it easier to upload it to the Internet. This, in theory, may sound like a good idea, but for it to actually be worth the hassle, it needs to record better footage than the stock iPhone camera, and it doesn’t.

In normal lighting conditions, the iPhone’s camera is a better camera in almost every way than the Eyemore. In extremely dark environments, the Eyemore is capable of capturing more detail, but the footage looks so bad that I would still consider it unusable. 

Eyemore claims that this camera has 14 stops of dynamic range and provides three different HDR settings. Keep in mind that the world’s most popular cinema camera, the Arri Alexa, has 15 stops of dynamic range, so this is a bold claim. Turning on HDR on the Eyemore does recover shadows, but once again, the noise/grain is outrageously bad. There are many more problems that I have with this camera that I’m not going to spend time writing about, but you can watch the video above to hear them all. 

Unless the camera we have is physically broken, it’s pretty obvious that the Eyemore S1 promo video is a total lie. I’m not sure that any footage in that entire video was filmed with this camera. When it shows the shot of the night sky, I’m pretty sure that is a long exposure raw photograph taken with a DSLR. This is just another example of a fake crowdfunded product. It’s easy to make a beautiful promo video filled with exaggerated specs to get people excited, but these products that seem too good to be true almost always are. It’s hard to invent a product and bring it to market, but it’s even harder to create a camera that can compete with brands that have been in the industry for decades. 

I’m not saying you should never back another Kickstarter or Indigogo campaign, but if the product seems complex, especially for a startup, there is a very good chance they won’t be able to pull it off. Just wait for the product to come to market and for the reviews to come out. If the product is good, it will be easy to buy, but 99 percentof the time, these products will never actually be able to compete once they hit the market.