- A new camera can keep watch over your home or mount to your dashboard or snowboarding helmet to capture action footage. The Flir FX is targeting the audiences for both Dropcam and GoPro, while bringing a killer feature along in its Android and iOS companion app.
With RapidRecap, the FX does something its competitors can’t: record a day’s worth of action, overlay all the movement, and play it back simultaneously, so you can see everything that happened all at once. It feels a bit like a Dr. Who episode—people, animals and objects moving past each other, with timestamps over their heads showing they were actually never together. Tap a time stamp, and the Flir FX app plays that specific chunk of footage on its own. Footage is condensed into RapidRecaps in the cloud.
The FX isn’t actually continuously recording. Instead, the camera’s motion sensor tells the device to start recording whenever something in front of it moves, day or night. (The FX can shoot in infrared night vision, but can’t do thermal imaging like its sibling products.) The app also lets you see a live stream of whatever’s happening in front of your camera in real time as well—in case you want to, for example, check in on the house while you’re out on vacation.
The FX records at resolution up to 1080p, with a super-wide 160-degree viewing angle. When detached from the included AC adapter, it can go four hours on its battery, more than a GoPro GPRO +0.56%. It records wirelessly, uploading video to the cloud via Wi-Fi. If there’s no Wi-Fi, it can also record to a MicroSD card. Flir is selling four different housings for the FX: an indoor stand; an outdoor housing that will shield the camera from the elements and add additional LEDs for night vision; a plastic sport case that’s waterproof to a 65-foot depth; and a dashboard mount for those who want to record while driving.
As fascinating as it is that Flir is taking on both of the popular cameras of the moment, it’s worth noting that these activities are mutually exclusive. What’s watching your house when you take your camera with you to the ski lodge? To reap the same benefits, you’ll still have to buy two—or a Dropcam and a GoPro.
The FX is available for pre-order starting today, shipping later this month to retailers such as Best Buy BBY -1.63%, Target, Home Depot HD -1.18%, Sam’s Club, Amazon and others. The FX will sell for $200 ($250 when bundled with the outdoor housing). Every FX gets a basic version of Flir’s cloud service which stores the last 48 hours of footage, and includes three RapidRecaps a month. For $10 a month, users get access to seven days of footage and an unlimited number of RapidRecaps. For $20, the premium service includes 30 days of footage storage and unlimited RapidRecaps.
