Canon PowerShot N: The Future Of Tiny Cameras Is Touchscreen Squares?

Canon PowerShot N: The Future Of Tiny Cameras Is Touchscreen Squares?


The new Canon PowerShot N includes a lot of the features that Canon (and other companies) been adding to tiny point-and-shoots over the years, like Wi-Fi connectivity and touchscreen controls. What makes it new and refreshing — at least aesthetically — is the new square design. It’s noticeably different, but does that make it better?

Indeed, the Canon Power Elph cameras have been the quintessential point-and-shoots forever, and that the PowerShot N ditches the Elph moniker is significant. They’ve gotten smaller and smaller over the years and piled on the features, but they’ve still remained essentially rectangles of more or less the same proportion. The PowerShot N is still technically a rectangular cube, but it has been shortened on the long side and made taller and thicker. So, consider that the PowerShot N is 8cm x 6cm x 3cm whereas the latest and greatest ELPH 530 HS measures 9cm x 5cm x 2cm.


As touchscreens have been added to point-and-shoot camera, the cameras in turn have been losing buttons. Welcome to the smartphone logic to the extreme where the and there’s not a single button on the back of the camera. The touchscreen on the back allows you to control everything, and it flips out 90 degrees. It’s a striking look.

Of course because this is the future, the camera has Wi-Fi connectivity so that you can share your photos online more easily. Canon says it has greatly improved the system so that using connected features isn’t a pain, to which we respond that we’ll believe it when we see it. There’s also a new ECO mode that will be added to all Canon PowerShot cameras going forward. It’s basically a very strict power save mode that Canon claims will trim 30-percent of your battery consumption.

As for the guts, there’s nothing surprising, a 12.1-megapixel sensor, an 8x zoom and the Digic 5 image processor that’s been around for over a year. But really, we’re dying to know what it’s like to use a camera this shape. We’ll know for sure when it drops in April for $US300. (Australian release has been scheduled for May.) [Canon]


The Cheapest NBN 50 Plans

It’s the most popular NBN speed in Australia for a reason. Here are the cheapest plans available.

At Gizmodo, we independently select and write about stuff we love and think you'll like too. We have affiliate and advertising partnerships, which means we may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page. BTW – prices are accurate and items in stock at the time of posting.