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A New Flagship - The Enlaps Tikee 4X Timelapse Camera

My thoughts on the new Tikee 4X, an upgraded long term timelapse flagship camera from Enlaps.

I’ve been taking timelapse videos for almost 15 years, see some of them here, and for a couple of years now have been working with the long-term timelapse solutions from Enlaps. You can see my previous articles on their cameras and ecosystem here, and I just got a new demo unit from the French company. Disclaimer: I got the unit for free but otherwise wasn’t compensated for this post.

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Familiar Strengths

The latest new product from Enlaps is the new Tikee 4X - the successor to the Tike 44. It still has everything that made the predecessor so powerful as a fully autonomous camera for long term timelapse and project monitoring. Whether it’s for construction, nature, events, and whether you just want a timelapse clip in the end, regular content, or enhanced security, or monitor safety and progress, the solution remains as powerful as ever.

A few quick highlights of the hardware:

  • 6k Resolution

  • Panoramic framing through two lenses and sensors

  • LTE / WiFi built in

  • Solar panel built in

  • Designed for fully autonomous outdoor operation

Not to forget that it of course works with the mytikee cloud platform, including the improved subscription plans launched last year. While I know many people don’t like paying monthly for yet another software, I want to highlight again that I have yet to find another way to process long term timelapse footage as easily as with the mytikee platform, on top of all the other features for monitoring and remote access.

Having said that, you can also use the camera offline and get raw files from the SD card.

A quick video covering around 48h, taken on the Tikee 4X and exported straight from mytikee with the default settings.

What’s New

There are a few nice new features over the predecessor, some have been adopted from the Tikee Mini+:

New Live Preview

  1. There are now realtime fast live previews available through the App while setting up the camera, makes it much easier to frame your shot while on site.

  2. You can now set a fixed white balance, which is useful for some agricultural and industrial applications that require color consistency.

  3. Next, we got a new low light mode, helps capture clean transitions from day to night, or construction sites operating during the night as well.

  4. In addition, much better real-time livestreaming, which you can keep running as long as needed now. This means fewer site visits to see what is going on in a project, useful for security monitoring as well.

  5. And last, new daylight auto scheduling, so if you have projects running over months the Tikee automatically adjusts its shooting periods according to available light as the days get shorter or longer.

Low Light Mode

Performance of the sensors in dark conditions has been improved significantly - definitely delivering usable images now.

Daylight Auto Schedule

No need to manually make changes or cut a lot of unnecessary images during post production - saves battery too! Of course you can include an offset to start taking images for a certain period before sunrise or after sunset as well.

Beyond that, the camera also got a few improvements in terms of usability, some of which address pain points I had highlighted in the past (always great if a manufacturer listens to its customers!):

  1. LTE connectivity is much easier to configure.

  2. The capture setup is finally foolproof, no more “start/stop” function that you might accidentally forget to set.

  3. The performance of the instant remote access feature has been improved. While it still requires a SIM card to function, this looks to be more reliable now.

Watch my quick intro video

Pricing: The pricing has barely changed and sits at 2280 USD excluding VAT, while the pack with additional accessories is 3229 USD excluding VAT. Get 50 EUR off of a Tikee product: FK-ENLAPS - order https://shop.enlaps.io/en-ww

Summary

So all in all, while maybe not a huge upgrade,  a really nice set of improvements again. More and more of the few shortcomings I complained about over the years have been addressed, and a couple new features included at the same time.

Looking forward to try this over the coming months!

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