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Introduction
Yeah, I know I’m late to the party. I have been kinda waffling on picking up a pair of the Ray-Ban Meta Smartglasses for a while, but a few things have kept me from pulling the trigger. First off, I wear glasses, so I need prescription lenses. The price for prescription transitions on the Ray Ban site was pretty high, and I don’t have vision insurance. I would read the reviews and stuff, but once I added in prescription transition lenses and the price went to like $700 I was like “OUT”.
This changed when I was browsing reddit and found out about Lensology. They make prescription lenses for the Ray Ban Metas, with whatever tint/transitions/coatings you want, then mail them to you and you just pop them in. Their prices are a lot more reasonable, about $160 USD for my prescription lenses with Transitions Gen S and all the fancy streak resistant coating and all, shipped.
What I ended up doing, and what I would suggest you do if you don’t have vision insurance, is to purchase the frames on Amazon, and then order your lenses from Lensology. If you have vision insurance, you can order them direct from RayBan or go to a local Lenscrafters.
Specs… get it?
The Meta smart glasses have a few different features. On the left side of the frame is a 12mp wide angle camera, the right side gets a notification light. There’s a shutter button on top of the right arm, and a touch sensitive area on the side of the right arm. You get speakers above both ears.
Camera Performance
The camera is very wide, something like 15mm equivalent, which makes sense, given that will make it easier to get stuff in frame with no “Viewfinder”, and it also makes stabilization more effective. The cameras are overall very good, better than I honestly expected. They are always in portrait orientation, which makes sense given what they’re supposed to be for, but still isn’t my preference. Video is 1440×1920 at 30fps. Photos are 3024×4032, roughly 12MP.
Photo performance in particular is better than I expected. The glasses basically produce photos that look like they came from a newish phone camera. Considering the size and weight constraints, that’s honestly pretty impressive. I don’t think anyone is buying these specifically for photography in the way that you would buy like, a mirrorless camera, so taking roughly phone quality photos for social media is probably the right call. You can tell them to take a photo with “hey meta, take a photo” which is honestly way more useful than I thought it would be. It’s nice to be able to get a POV shot hands-free when I’m doing something on a car or cooking and have stuff on my hands that I don’t want on my phone (or glasses).
Overall pretty good. It can be a little hard to center things if you’re trying to take a picture of something you’re holding relatively close to your face, but for more or less everything else, you pretty much just end up with a picture of what you’re looking at, thanks to the wide lens. Low light performance is fine, but not amazing, but honestly that’s about what I expected. It would be kinda pointless to make these VERY GOOD at still photography in low light. Like why?
Video performance is good too. The 1440p resolution is fine for social media and pretty much anything you would reasonably use these for. Stabilization is solid, you do need to remember not to move your head from side to side too much though. I was shooting one video where I was crossing a parking lot and I kept checking both ways to make sure the cars were stopping and watching the video started to make me feel a little motion sick. As long as you’re generally looking in just one direction for most of the video, it works out fine though, particularly in good light. Check out the YouTube video above for lots of sample video footage.
The microphones are also good, audio in the videos is clear and well isolated without sounding too robotic, as long as it’s not too windy. I can’t really fault them for not being perfect in high-wind situations though, it’s not like you can put a dead cat on them.
Audio Performance
Audio is one of my favorite features of these glasses, and I didn’t think it would be. I kinda considered the speakers and stuff an afterthought, but I ended up using them a ton. They’re okay for music, but to be honest I’m probably still going to reach for my AirPods Pros if I actually want to listen to music. The main use case I found for them is phone calls. The speakers are great for phone calls, and if you wear prescription glasses like me, they’re already on your face all the time. It’s SO nice to be able to just reach up and double tap my glasses to take a phone call instead of having to dig my phone out and hold it or find my AirPods and switch the call over, especially if my hands are full. Maybe I’m an outlier in the amount of phone calls I get, but I would honestly buy these glasses for that feature alone too.
The mics seems to work great on phone calls, I’ve been stealthily taking phone calls on them since I got them and I didn’t tell anyone I was talking to them via smart glasses. I haven’t had a single comment on the audio quality, which leads me to believe it’s pretty damn good. No one has asked me if I have them on speaker or if I’m using a bluetooth mic or anything, so I assume they just sound normal.
Battery Life
Battery life isn’t great, but I’ve found that that isn’t a deal breaker. Battery life does vary wildly depending on what you’re doing. In standby mode, just using them as glasses, they seem to lose between 5-10% battery per hour. I could turn off the always listening assistance and probably get that down to 2-5% per hour. Also, there is a power switch near the left hinge. If you’re just sitting at a desk using them as glasses, you can always just switch them off and presumably get next to zero power drain.
As a test, I screenshotted my battery life for a few hours the other day under light to moderate usage. I took a couple of pictures and a short video, used them for a few phone calls, and used them as headphones to watch a few YouTube videos.
The first four pics show my battery go from nearly full at 8:50 to 58% at 12:15. The last two screen shots show long they take to charge, I got from 47% to 92% in 27 minutes.
If you’re taking a lot of pictures and video, the battery will do down pretty quickly. I used them to take LOTS of videos at an auction the other day and I knocked my battery down from nearly full to about 60 percent in under an hour, but I did shoot something like 20 minutes of video.
The reason this doesn’t make much difference to me is that I routinely take off my glasses anyway. I’m nearsighted, so while I do use glasses when working on a monitor or driving, I don’t use glasses when I’m doing something like paperwork, which I do a lot of. I’ve found that just removing them when I would remove my glasses anyway and putting them in the charging case means they’re almost always charged anyway.
Also, I highly recommend you turn off the “Hey Meta” always listening capability, at least most of the time. The glasses get significantly better battery life with this feature off, and even with the always listening capability off, you can still tap and hold on the touch sensitive area on the right arm to summon the Meta AI features. Basically all you’re losing is the ability to do that hands-free. I just turn it back on when I think I might need it, and leave it off almost always and enjoy the better battery life.
Charging case battery life is very good too. I’ve been charging my pretty often for two days now and it just now dropped from 5 dots to 4, presumably meaning I just dropped under 80% battery. Unless you’re just trying to live stream every moment of your life, I don’t see how anyone would kill the charging case in a day, so really the only thing you have to worry about is “How much will it annoy me to take off my glasses for half an hour every 4 or 5 hours?”. For me, the answer to that question is “Not much”, but your mileage may vary.
Conclusion and Hopes for Next Gen
The Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses are one of those products that are kinda greater than the sum of their parts. The cameras are fine, but don’t blow me away with the image quality in the same way, say, the Pocket 3 did. The audio is also fine, but not as good as dedicated headphones like the AirPods Pro 2. The battery life is okay but not great, so on paper you would think these are, as the kids say, mid.
But honestly, the whole package works together so well it makes them pretty compelling. The ability to have hands-free POV cameras are great for anyone who wants to post videos of cooking or working on cars or make crochet tutorials or any number of other things, not to mention just capturing things that happen in your day to day life to post to social media. I’m guessing the fact that they excel at this isn’t an accident. The cameras are more than good enough, and they’re going to seem great to anyone who only uses cell phone cameras anyway.
Having a pair of “headphones” that are already on all the time is so amazing for phone calls or watching a YouTube or instagram video without disturbing the people around you. The speakers aren’t the best sounding at full volume, but they sound good enough at up to like 70% volume and the microphones perform great in both videos and phone calls.
The last real barrier to entry, the high cost of prescription lenses, is solved by buying them from lensology and snapping them in yourself.
Of course, nothing is perfect, and it’s still pretty early days for smart glasses, so there’s a ton of stuff I hope to see eventually come to the next gen of Meta glasses, or really just to any smart glasses that come out in the future.
First and foremost, I am old, and I’m really into cameras, so I’m not exactly the target demographic to be a huge fan of portrait orientation video. I understand why Meta would make this choice, but that doesn’t mean I have to love it. I think the real solution to smart glasses is a higher resolution sensor that’s closer to a square shape, like the 5.3k 8:7 sensor found in the newer GoPro cameras. That allows you to capture video once in a close-to-square aspect ratio, and the high resolution lets you punch out a 16:9 widescreen OR 9:16 portrait video from that square that’s still 4k. I get that Meta have very little incentive to do that, but it would make them a lot more useful. I would love to be able to shoot landscape video to use as B roll in my YouTube videos.
Battery life isn’t a deal breaker for me, but more is always better. I’m sure this will be better in the next gen just as a side effect of things like newer, more efficient SoC’s and newer battery technology.
The glossy black finish is a huge dust magnet, and you can probably tell from all my sample pictures, but that’s probably just that one finish. All the pics that still look dusty were taken after I vigorously wiped them down with a cleaning cloth and immediately set them down to take the picture. They were MUCH worse before.
Some kind of display would be amazing, that’s the real dream, and Meta has recently shown off their Orion AR glasses, and the tech looks promising, but I feel like we’re still quite a ways away from that technology being viable on a large scale and at a consumer-friendly price point. Also the fact that the lenses are the screens is going to greatly complicate things for wearers who need prescription lenses.
Overall, if smart glasses are a thing you think you might want, you should probably pick up a pair of the Ray-Ban Metas. They’re pretty much the state of the art right now, and the price is pretty reasonably at under $300 to start.
