Canon’s Experimental PowerShot PX Gets International Release
Canon’s experimental PowerShot PICK that was originally launched as a crowdfunding campaign in Japan appears to be getting an international rollout. Renamed the PowerShot PX, the camera is at the very least coming to Europe.
The pitch for the PowerShot PX is relatively straightforward: Canon believes that a great many people want to capture everyday moments but don’t want to take themselves out of those moments in order to photograph them. To that end, the PowerShot PX slots in nicely.
It’s an artificial intelligence-driven tiny point and shoot that is capable of recognizing a scene, following the action, and automatically capturing photos. Canon believes that the camera has enough smarts to be fully trusted to handle snapshot duties which lets families focus on the tasks at hand without fearing that anything worth remembering will be missed thanks to built-in subject recognition that can be told to prioritize certain faces.
The best photos aren’t always the posed smiles, although they’re always popular. The PowerShot PX captures a huge range of looks and precious reactions that you might not capture.
The camera has an internal battery that charges via USB-C and connects to Wi-Fi networks so that the photos it takes can be automatically delivered to a smartphone app. It can also connect directly to smartphones via Bluetooth. In addition to just trusting the PX to know when to take a photo, it can also be specifically commanded using voice commands, of which it supports four.
Hardware-wise, the PowerShot PX captures 11.7-megapixel photos and Full HD 1080p video at up to 60 frames per second. The head of the camera can pan 340-degrees and tilt 110-degrees with a 19-57mm equivalent zoom lens that the AI can use to automatically frame photos on its own.
Below are a few sample images captured with the PX, and while they aren’t what many would consider to be “Earth-shattering” in quality, they are about on par with what can be expected from many smartphones with the added benefit that the camera presumably shot the images without any human intervention.
The PowerShot PX will come to Europe and the United Kingdom in November and will retail for £500 or €500, which is about $585. No information about release in North America was available at the time of publication.