Lightbox, The World’s Smallest Social Camera, Is Giving GoPro A Run For Its Money

GoPro, the creator of the popular HD personal camera, recently went public on Nasdaq at a $3 billion valuation, but now some tough competition seems to have emerged on the crowdfunding horizon. With three weeks still to go on its campaign, the world’s smallest live-streaming wearable camera, called the Lightbox, has already raised $183,000, more than doubling its $80,000 crowdfunding goal.

What has helped boost the Lightbox into crowdfunding stardom are its comprehensive connectivity capabilities and its tiny size – at only 1.5 inches long and wide it is more than half the size of GoPro’s latest camera, the HERO3+. The Lightbox, whose full name is the CA7CH Lightbox, can be clipped to your shirt, bag, or wetsuit using a magnetic clip and captures pictures or streams video in an instant. In fact, creating a device that could capture spontaneous moments was the idea behind the Lightbox camera that was conjured up by Catch Motion entrepreneurs Rom Eizenberg, Robert Kowalik and Leif Chastaine.

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Share it all, in an instant

The Lightbox camera jumps hurdles over the standard in media sharing technology by working in unison with the user’s smartphone to make sharing and saving images and videos a no-brainer. With impressive pro-photography features, including a 8 megapixel sensor with up to 1080p capabilities, a built-in microphone and a waterproof case, the Lightbox camera was designed to go wherever, whenever. The camera is connected to the internet via WiFi and Bluetooth and includes built-in cloud storage of up to 8GB, allowing users to decide what they want to share and when.

Although the camera is essentially hands-free, it has one button on its surface that can be programmed by users to capture single images, a short 12 second video, record audio or stream video live. This is a feature that GoPro cameras only recently introduced, allowing the user, even the extreme sportsman, to stream their activities live to their smartphones. The Viewfinder synchronizes between smartphones and the Lightbox to allow the user to control the framing, filters and composition of what they are about to shoot through the comfort of their phone’s screen. There is even an option to create a GIF, or a series of photos streamed in succession, and the possibility of combining multiple cameras into one to get a lot of different angles from one event.

Cheaper, smaller and cooler, but is it better?

If Lightbox sounds too good to be true, wait until we tell you the price. For nearly the same price as one of GoPro’s top-of-the-line action camera, the HERO3+, you can get four Lightbox cameras and 5GB of free cloud storage for $540. One of these tiny bad boys and extra storage capabilities will cost you $119 according to CA7CH’s Kickstarter campaign and will be shipped by November 2014, a deal that many in the crowdfunding and photography communities are learning is too good to be missed. However, before the Lightbox is declared the victor in the personal camera sector, it is important to know that the newest GoPro cameras have four times the HD capabilities than the Lightbox and is significantly more durable in its construction.  Another downside, of course, is that this camera has not yet been extensively tested, since it is not yet on the market.

But with over a thousand backers and hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of support, there’s no doubt that CA7CH’s tiny camera making waves in the world of wearable tech.