The worst gadget of 2024 has a killer camera feature

This story is part of Andy Boxall's OuttaFocus series, covering smartphone cameras and photography.

The Rabbit R1 isn’t a very good product at all, but hidden inside this disappointing AI gadget is a killer camera mode that almost makes it worth buying. It’s called Magic Camera, and at its heart, it’s very similar to Google’s generative AI photo modes, where AI reimagines the scene it’s presented with.

What makes the R1 different is not only its own unique style, but also how the device’s shortcomings get turned around to become a fun part of the experience. It’s the most enjoyment I’ve had with the R1 and with AI photography yet. Here’s why.

What is the Magic Camera?

Don’t worry if you haven’t heard of the Magic Camera feature on the R1 before. It was added in a software update many weeks after the initial reviews were published, so if you dismissed the R1 at that time and haven’t paid any attention since, it won’t be familiar for that reason. The Magic Camera isn’t a mode on the Rabbit R1 either; it’s an AI image generator in the cloud, ready and waiting to give photos taken with the R1 a completely new look.

The good news is that using the Magic Camera couldn’t be easier. You simply point the Rabbit R1’s camera at your subject and double-press the side button to take the image. From this point, you don’t have to do anything at all, but it’s here where we come across the first — let’s call it an idiosyncrasy — of the R1 and its Magic Camera. You can’t view the original or the Magic Camera-generated image on the device at all.

Instead, you have to go down the Rabbithole — and I’m not just being cute with my wording. The Rabbithole is the name for the Rabbit R1’s online portal, where all the content captured and generated by the R1 is stored and displayed. You’ll need to grab your phone or head to your computer to see the photos from the R1, but rather than being a downside (and going against the whole “phone replacement” thing with the R1), it somehow adds to the excitement for me. It’s almost like waiting for film to be developed after taking photos on vacation.

Turning bad photos into something special

I love the Magic Camera because it takes the most mundane, ordinary, and badly composed photos and makes something fun and eye-catching from them. It’s also wonderfully unconcerned with the subject matter at times, which allows it to make something new from the original rather than simply adapting it. But when it is aware of details in a photo, it then builds its reimagined image around some of those aspects. It’s creative in the best way.

What do I mean? I’ll show you. The first photo of my MacBook next to a muffin is poorly framed, taken without any care at all, and would be one I’d delete from my phone at any other time. But the Magic Camera ignores all this and makes a charming image from it. Everything is there, from the phone to the flowers, in what you’ll soon see is the R1’s trademark pixel art-style look.

The second photo was an accident. I was testing the R1’s visual search to see if it could tell me the name of the person on the calendar (the R1 didn’t know, but it’s Korean actress and singer Kang Hye-won), only to find the photo had been given the Magic Camera treatment when I visited the Rabbithole. It takes all the elements from the photo and even maintains the sunny, early-morning ambiance in its recreation. See the rabbit on the couch? That’s the Magic Camera’s mascot, and there’s almost always a rabbit hidden somewhere in its images.

The final photo here shows the R1 recognizing the Porsche emblem on the steering wheel and then keeping it in the Magic Camera image, but then populating the world beyond the windshield with Porsche-like vehicles. Amusingly, it decided to make my right-hand drive car left-hand drive — and a manual to boot — all at the same time. It often gets even more creative, too, coming up with completely new interpretations of phones and watches and transforming you into someone entirely different for selfies.

Is the camera good?

I love how much fun the Magic Camera can be, and it does a very good job of hiding how terrible the R1’s camera actually is. The quality is very poor, with no detail, washed-out colors, and a measly 1080 x 1080 pixel resolution, meaning the photos it takes are never ones you’ll want to keep. The Magic Camera photos have an even lower resolution, just 1024 x 1024 pixels, but the pixel art style and digitally rendered detail make the most out of it.

Perhaps even worse than the quality of the photos is the actual experience of taking them with the R1. The screen, even at maximum brightness, is almost impossible to see outside in the daylight. You can squint and just about make out what’s in the frame, but there’s no opportunity to compose a photo. You just point it in the direction of something when you’re outdoors and hope for the best. But it doesn’t matter because Magic Camera isn’t worried about any of this.

The Rabbit R1 takes bad photos, the camera is entirely bare-bones, and the screen is practically useless unless you’re indoors. The camera shutter is slow to react, and it takes time to process the photo before you can close the camera after you’ve taken it. It rivals the Nokia 3210 as one of the least satisfying cameras I’ve used over the past year. Yet here I am, making a point to take photos with it, and it’s all due to the Magic Camera entirely ignoring the fact that it’s a terrible camera.

AI at its best — or worst?

It’s very hard to be creative with the Rabbit R1’s camera because of its shortcomings, but I don’t need to be, as the AI does all the creative heavy lifting, taking my rubbish photos and making them quirky, eye-catching, and unique. I can safely say that I didn’t take any of the Magic Camera’s photos, I just took the photos that inspired them. Depending on how you feel about AI taking on an evermore creative role, this will either excite or depress you.

I bought the Rabbit R1 hoping to find some personality, as AI in consumer tech at the moment centers around productivity and other boring, but necessary functionality. I found some of that personality in Magic Camera, and I adore that engineers have spent time creating a distinctive, cohesive character for its images, rather than either letting it do something new every time or just giving us a choice of keywords to influence the end result. It’s AI having fun, and that’s enjoyable to see.

Just as we were about to publish this story, Rabbit announced a new Magic Camera feature called Freestyle. In this feature, you can tell the camera how you want the AI-generated images to look, such as “take a picture of this and turn it into a pencil sketch.” This sounds interesting, but for me, it has been more fun watching the AI get creative without my input.

While the rest of the Rabbit R1 hasn’t lived up to expectations, Magic Camera has surpassed them due to being given free rein to create striking images, but within a carefully curated set of guidelines to ensure a continued unique style. The added spice is that we have to wait and see the results after returning home.

The R1’s Magic Camera mode is AI creativity done right, and I love it. But is it worth buying the Rabbit R1 for the Magic Camera? If you like what you see here, don’t care that it’s not very good at all aside from this, and have $200 sitting around waiting to be spent, then I’d actually say yes. It’s that fun.