In January of 2013, Canon announced a weird compact camera called the PowerShot N. A decade later and with "vintage" point and shoots making a comeback, how well does this strange little camera hold up?
I really enjoyed reading the Photography: The Definitive Visual History and it got me thinking about blending older forms of photography with newer digital equipment. I became obsessed with TLR (Twin Lens Reflex) cameras -- not for their ability to view through one lens while capturing an image through the other, but for the style of photography that this type of camera forces the photographer to adopt.
The digital camera industry is dominated by eye-level viewfinders, but waist-level finders have their advantages. One main one is that it makes photographing strangers less threatening since the photographer is looking down instead of directly at the subjects.
Canon's attention grabber at this year's CES 2013 is a new compact camera designed to fight against the encroachment of smartphones: the PowerShot N.
The little guy is unlike most point-and-shoots you'll find on the market. It's extremely small, square, and simple. The design may seem gimmicky at first, but pick it up in your hands and your opinion might change.
As smartphones have risen to compact supremacy, slowly killing the point-and-shoot market as a result, every company has tried one thing or another to somehow save the compact. Now, it's Canon's turn. But instead of adding a gimmicky feature, or doing away with compacts all-together in favor of mirrorless systems, the company has decided to re-invent the wheel... okay, the point-and-shoot.
The result is the new PowerShot N, a compact camera that has no top, bottom, left or right -- it's an incredibly thin square with a center-mounted lens and articulating screen you can use however you see fit.