Canon’s new PowerShot N100 is also called the Story Camera. Why? Because it reads to you as you fall asleep at night? Because it puts speech bubbles in the mouths of your portrait subjects? Nope. It’s because it has a second camera on the back that snaps a photo of the photographer as they snap a picture of, well, anything.
With the Story Camera, everything is a selfie. Picture of a famous monument? Selfie. Photo of mourners at a funeral? Selfie. Picture of yourself taken in the infinite reflections of a mirrored elevator car? Selfie, selfie, selfie…
The N100 has its second camera on the rear panel, above the tilting LCD screen, and the main camera (in the usual spot) is actually pretty good, with a 1/1.7-inch sensor and an ƒ1.8–5.7, 24–120mm equivalent lens. It also has Wi-Fi and NFC, so you can quickly share photos with your phone for uploading to Instagram or other selfie-publishing sites.
Price? $350, available in May. But who the hell will buy this? Clearly an executive at Canon is panicking about losing compact camera sales to phone cameras, and shouted down from his plush, glass-walled office to the workers below that they should “make a selfie camera, because all the kids love selfies, right?”
Wrong. Well, right and wrong. They love selfies, but they love them because they’re so easy to snap and share with their phones.
Source: DP Review
