What the heck is Alice Camera? World first hands-on review!
Alice camera is an Ai powered, micro four thirds mirrorless camera that works wirelessly with your phone. The images and video are then stored automatically to your phone (as well as backed up inside Alice camera) so you can share your content straight away.
The idea of Alice Camera is to bridge the gap between a smart phone and a mirrorless camera, so you can get the high quality optics of a camera, and also have the innovation, connectivity, convenience, and usability of a smart phone.
You can watch my full video review here, or read my blog and see some sample images!
If you’re familiar with phone apps, then you’ll find Alice super easy to use so it’s great for beginners who are looking to improve the quality over their phone, but you do also have access to advanced features too which I’ll show you shortly.
So… See this blog as an exciting preview to Alice Camera. I have been using it daily for the past few weeks, so this is very much an in-depth video rather than just a “first look” sort of thing…. this is a camera that is still in the final stages of development (as of Jan 2024), and this unit is very much pre-production. So do keep that in mind as we talk about it.
Hardware Tour of Alice Camera
You turn on the Alice Camera and it connects to the Alice Camera app. Then you’re ready to go. This takes just a few seconds, and is quite intuitive, though do keep in mind that if it stays idle for too long it can power off, which takes quite a bit longer than a standard camera to be ready shooting.
If you’re out and about shooting street photography for example, you can leave the camera in a sleep mode between shots so it’s really fast to get shooting again.
Remote Use of Alice Camera
Your phone doesn’t need to be glued to the Alice Camera unit. You can move your phone away from the camera. This has several benefits.
You can turn your phone around so it’s like selfie-mode on top of Alice, or even use it as an external monitor from across the room.
This is my favourite feature of Alice Camera as someone who needs to shoot a lot of behind the scenes content. my usual method is to leave a gopro or a camera rolling. That leaves me with one hour or more of footage to sift through, which seldom gets done.
If I use Alice camera as my behind the scenes camera at a photo shoot for instance, I can leave it (her? lol) on a tripod in the corner ready to rock, and I can start and stop the recording using the app on my phone. Much easier to wrangle. Better still, it’ll all be stored on my phone too if I wish, so I can share some juicy snippets right away.
Sensor Tech… Why is Alice Camera better than your phone?
This is a question I see a lot of people having. The answer is simple: Alice Camera is stacked with a high quality micro four thirds sensor that is bigger than even the best phones out there.
We have the same 12 megapixel, dual native ISO sensor that you’d find in the GH5s and the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera. So this is a versatile and lovely, tried and true, high-end sensor.
Only 12mp I hear you gasp?! Well... That’s more than enough for socials, and it has some great benefits too. This particular sensor has larger pixels, and because there are fewer of them, they’re much better for soaking up light. This should — in theory — give us fantastic low light performance for both photo and video. It certainly does on the other cameras that utilise this particular sensor.
And for any phone evangelists, the micro four thirds sensor is 300% bigger than the latest iPhone 15 pro’s sensor. So even if you have a FANTASTIC phone camera, Alice Camera still has some great benefits for you.
Battery Life?
I haven’t had a proper chance to test this in the real world, but I’ve been told Alice Camera has a huge 5000 milliamp hour battery. This should be more than enough for a full days’ shooting, or even some live streaming.
Build Quality
The camera body feels SUPER robust, made from Aluminium, which is a trick Leica have used more than once in their time.
But despite the robust build quality, Alice Camera isn’t too heavy at all, especially if you pair it with smaller lenses. I — of course — wish it were smaller. But I wish all cameras were smaller. I might be the wrong person to ask. Perhaps a future iteration will have a smaller form factor, but for now, considering what Alice Camera is capable of, I think the size is more of less justified.
It’s quite comfy in the hand too. I personally like to push the phone forwards a bit in the holder, just to make some more room at the back, which is fine to do. You can customise your grip to your liking depending on where your phone sits.
Connectivity with Alice Camera
For connectivity, there’s a mic input and you can also add in audio accessories via the USB-C port. It’s perfectly modern in this respect with all the connectivity you may need for your peripherals.
One thing it does lack is a hotshoe, but there is a cold shoe mount on top which is ideal for microphones or turning your phone to face you for monitoring.
And of course there’s a tripod mount on the bottom which of course is always handy. I do wish there was a tripod mount on the side, too, given a lot of the target audience will likely be filming vertical video. But nothing an L bracket won’t fix.
Alice Camera: The thing to remember!
I must emphasise that everything — all the processing, all the decisions — everything is done 100% inside of Alice Camera. It has its own octa-core processor, and all the other techy bells and whistles to make it a standalone unit. The phone is just used as a viewfinder and for operation. So it doesn’t matter if you connect this to a state of the art phone, or a much more basic model. Alice Camera takes all the work.
Alice Camera App Tour
This is a huge component to the overall usability of Alice Camera, and I think that they’ve done a great job with the app. Alice Camera will be compatible with both iOS and Android.
The app has all the features you need and looks quite similar to the standard Camera app within an iPhone.
You can leave settings on automatic if you’re a beginner, or take full control if you know what you’re doing. When something is green, the camera is in control. Red, you’re in control. And orange is a temporary change that’ll reset when you click away from it. This traffic light system is quite unique and really simple to grasp.
You can switch from photo mode to video mode very easily by swiping, just like you can in a standard phone camera app.
All the footage and photos are saved directly to your camera roll, as well as internally to Alice Camera. There is ample storage internally, but unfortunately no way to expand the storage. There’s no access to the micro SD slot.
This means you always have a “just in case” backup, and you can easily connect Alice Camera to a laptop to retrieve your files.
When it comes to connecting Alice to your computer it just shows up as an external device, so there’s no extra software or faffing to deal with. Which makes me VERY happy. Less bloatware, camera makers!!
So… Who is Alice Camera for?
First and foremost? Sorry Alice Camera if this wasn’t the answer you wanted to hear, but I think your main demographic is…. camera nerds.
Hello! This is definitely where I fit in. I love any innovation within the photography realm, and this project has caught my eye for a while now.
You know how we have this resurgence of film photography at the moment? I mean, I do love film photography, but I am notoriously bad at either being stingy with my shots and having one roll last half a year. Or worse, I just don’t get round to getting things developed. I even have some rolls on the shelf from years back.
My nerdy brain immediately went VINTAGE LENSES! when I saw Alice Camera.
With Alice Camera, I can go out with my Canon FD lenses, or my lovely Helios 44-2 lens, and have some great vintage looks straight onto my phone.
The manual focusing system on Alice Camera even seems like a homage to this era of photography, with its Ai range finder. You just need to line things up and you know you have focus. You can also half press the shutter to magnify it. So Alice Camera is ideal if you like to use adapted lenses.
I can also see myself using Alice as an everyday carry sort of camera, even if it is a bit chunky. I think it would be super fun for street photography and travel photography, especially if you already own a few micro four thirds lenses.
I mean, look… Phone photography is great. It’s come so far. But you just can’t get the sort of depth of field, or bokeh, from a phone. You can’t get authentic vintage lenses onto a phone camera. This is a hill I will die on. Not to mention the optical zoom capabilities of the Alice Camera vs the phone. Just stick a compact zoom lens onto this setup and you’re good to go.
Who is Alice Camera NOT for?
I think you have to be excited about some of the things I’ve covered in this blog (and in my video review!). If you’re not yet excited, then this product may not be for you. And that is totally fine. I think if your workflow currently doesn’t involve a lot of social media posting, or editing “on the go”, then it is totally valid that this this might not be the camera for you.
If you’re not fussed about sharing things instantly, or turning your phone into a vintage camera with infinite lens possibilities, then Alice Camera might not be for you.
There are also live streaming benefits coming down the line, which is again quite niche. It’s all very exciting if you’re within the target audience, and probably very baffling if you’re not!
For the right person, I think Alice Camera is really quite exciting.
I cover a lot more in my dedicated review, and you can see the quality for yourself. But thanks so much for reading if you’ve got this far!
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