Hands on: Vuzix Wrap 280 TV specs review

I’ve tried out the Vuzix ‘video eyewear’ in the past and, to be honest, have tended to dismiss them as really just being a bit daft. The clunky visor design of their original iWear glasses looked plain silly, and I wasn’t terribly impressed by the video quality either.

Inside the glasses there are two small LCD displays, and wearing them so close to your eyes is intended to create the effect of watching a much larger TV screen. The idea is that you can wear them on a long plane flight or train ride and treat yourself to a kind of ‘personal cinema’ experience while watching movies on an iPod or other portable media player.

Unfortunately, I never previously found the large-screen effect terribly convincing. I was always aware that each eye was looking at a separate small image, and the glasses never really managed to create the illusion of watching a single, large screen.

Fancy specs
However, Vuzix has tried to address some of those problems with its latest models. It has spruced up the design for a start. As the name implies, the Wrap glasses are designed to look like a set of tinted wraparound sunglasses – which means that, instead of looking like that bloke from Star Trek, you now look like Bono instead.

The pair on test this time is the Wrap 280, which costs £179.99 and has the ability to display video in either 4:3 or 16:10 aspect ratio. Its two little LCD screens have a resolution of just 384x240 – not exactly high-def, but the image I got when watching Benjamin Button in widescreen mode was sharp enough to be perfectly watchable. There’s also a model called the Wrap 230 which is 4:3 only and costs £129.99, as well as the Wrap 920, which increases the screen resolution to 640x480 but costs £249.99. You can see details of the full range at vuzix.co.uk.

The biggest improvement is the ability to adjust the focus of each screen individually, using a small screwdriver supplied with the glasses. This time around I genuinely felt like I was looking at a single large screen and after a while I was able to forget the outside world and just relax and watch the film. The Wrap glasses run off two AA batteries, which fit into the chunky control panel unit and should give you about six hours of video playback.

It's a wrap
These latest models are certainly an improvement over their predecessors. Even so, the need for two cables to connect to an iPod, as well as the two separate earpieces that plug into the glasses for audio playback, makes the whole kit seem rather fiddly at times. So while the Wrap glasses are technically quite ingenious they’re probably still something of a luxury item for the well-heeled business traveler who wants to pass the time on a long, boring plane flight.