I Clipped an $89 Camera to My Son's Hat for One Week. I'm Never Filming Through My Phone Again.

I have 4,217 photos of my son on my phone. I counted last month, sitting in the parking lot after his first t-ball game. You know how many videos I have of an ordinary Saturday — the kind where nothing happens, except he's three and the light is good and he's laughing at the dog? Four. Four videos, in three years.

And here's the part that actually got me: I'm not in any of them. Not one. Because I'm always the one holding the phone.

That day at t-ball, he hit the ball off the tee — his first real hit — and I watched it happen on a 6.1-inch screen, in portrait mode, with my thumb half over the lens. He turned around to find me in the stands and I was a guy holding a rectangle in front of his face. The footage was shaky. The moment was gone. I got neither.

You've probably seen the video everyone was sharing last year — the little girl with the camera clipped to her cap, running through the park, the one with something like 47 million likes. My wife sent it to me with three crying emojis and the words "I want this."

So I looked up the camera. The famous tiny one. With the accessories we'd actually need, it came out near $400 — for a gadget my toddler would wear into a sandbox. The reviews mentioned it running hot and the battery dying in half an hour. I closed the tab.

A few weeks later an ad for something called the Treklon 4S showed up. Same thumb-sized, clip-on idea. $89. My first honest thought was: that's junk. Has to be. My second thought was: it has 30-day returns, and Father's Day is coming. Worst case, I send it back. I ordered it and decided to wear-test it for one week, like a science experiment, before forming an opinion.

This is what happened.

The box has the camera, a pile of clip mounts, a chest harness, and a cable. No 40-page manual, no QR code demanding I create an account. You charge it, you press the one button, a little light comes on, it's recording. There is no app required to record. No account. No subscription. I cannot tell you how suspicious I was of how easy this was.

I clipped it to his cap. He reached up, touched it once, and forgot it existed in roughly 90 seconds. That, I'd learn, is the entire trick.

Frame from Day 2. This is what the world looks like at two-foot-eight.

We did our normal park loop. I pushed him on the swings. I was not holding anything. Both hands, present, the whole time — and that night, after bedtime, I transferred the footage to my phone and sat on the couch and watched our completely ordinary morning from his height.

The grass looks like a jungle. The slide looks like a water tower. The dog's face arrives like a planet. And then there's this frame — he's running at me, and the camera catches me crouched down with my arms out, laughing.

I sat there longer than I'll admit. Then I clipped a 20-second piece and dropped it in the family group chat.

My mom replied with a voice memo. She was crying. Actually crying — the good kind. My brother, who reviews every gadget purchase in our family like a congressional committee, replied: "what camera is that??" When the family skeptic asks what camera, you know the footage doesn't look like an $89 camera.

The frame that broke the group chat. Straight off the camera, zero editing.

Tuesday it rained, and then he found the wet sandbox, and the camera — clipped to his cap the whole time — got splashed, gritted, and at one point briefly buried. It kept recording. I rinsed it in the sink like a Tupperware lid.

Here is the thing nobody tells you about filming kids: the reason you have no videos isn't your camera quality. It's that you'd never hand a three-year-old your $1,000 phone. An $89 camera that's waterproof and rugged changes the math completely. I stopped guarding it by Wednesday. I let him wear it into everything.

I got curious and clipped it to my own collar for my rec-league game. Both hands on the bat, camera handled itself.

Hands-free at the plate. Try this with a phone.

Sunday night I did the count again. One week with the Treklon: 31 videos. Three years with my phone: four. And the week's videos are better — not because the lens beats my iPhone's (it doesn't, and I'll get to that), but because the camera was actually there, rolling, while I was actually living.

The Honest Part

Is the footage Hollywood-grade? No. It's stabilized 4K with that wide, first-person, action-cam look — alive and a little raw, like the viral clips that made you want one of these in the first place. If you need cinema footage of your kid, hire a film crew. If you want to actually be in your Saturday mornings and still keep them forever, this is the tool.

And the price math in 2026 is honestly strange. The famous tiny cameras run $280–$450. The big action-cam brand is in the news questioning its own future, and camera prices across the industry are going up, not down. Then there's this:

I bought a second one for my dad for Father's Day. That's the whole review.

— Jake, who is finally in the videos