With the OBSBOT Tail, you can take good action video without even trying

I’ll admit: When the OBSBOT Tail first arrived, I wasn’t expecting much. It’s created by a company I’ve never heard of -- a young startup called Remo Technology based in China’s tech capital Shenzhen. Yet it promises to do what most well-established brands haven’t done: Building a video camera that spins around automatically to track and lock a subject in frame.

Sounds too good to be true. But Remo proved me wrong.

Check out OBSBOT Tail on Amazon

The OBSBOT Tail is really easy to use. And by that, I mean most of the time, the 4K camera does the job for you. All you have to do is tell it who to track: Either hold your palm up like a stop sign, or open the OBSBOT app on your smartphone and tap on the person you want to follow. Next, choose from four speed modes ranging from "slow" to "crazy". Once it starts filming, the lens pans around 360 degrees and tilts up and down by itself. The zooming, aperture setting, and white balance are taken care of automatically. All of the footage is stored on a microSD card.

It blows my mind how lazy I can be when shooting with the OBSBOT Tail. You pretty much just leave it alone to work its magic. And if you’re filming someone other than yourself, you can sit back and see the shot unfold in real time on the phone app. We tried following a child in a playground and a shopper on a mall escalator. The camera was able to lock the target at the center of the frame.

To take the challenge up a notch, we enlisted the help of Karen Choi, a professional ice skater and coach who moves faster than most regular human beings. During half an hour of jumps and spins, the OBSBOT Tail fixed its gaze tightly on Karen -- except for a few instances when she came too close to the camera.