Canon didn’t skip out on this year’s CES, making an announcement that revealed four new cameras to the world. While three of them are pretty standard, the PowerShot N is somewhat of a novel camera.
The Canon PowerShot N is the first to break away from the traditional camera design ethos. It sheds a significant amount of bulge from the sides and ditches the generations old rectangular design for one that is more like a square. With the advent of modern technology and the touch-screen becoming so responsive, Canon has ditched all buttons on the camera in favour of a 2.8 inch touchscreen. The LCD tilts upwards 90 degrees and offers a touch shutter as well.
What’s really novel about the PowerShot N however is its zoom and shutter mechanisms (seen below). Zooming is done by toggling a small switch built onto the lens either to the left or right while the shutter button is placed on a second ring on the lens. The half-press-to-focus-full-press-to-shoot mechanism still applies though, which is good. The camera also packs in Wi-Fi to be able to pair up with a hot-spot to provide instant uploads to social networks. As for other specs, the Canon PowerShot N bears a 12MP BSI CMOS sensor, the Digit 5 image processor, and a 28-224mm equivalent lens.
The other three cameras are the IXUS 140, PowerShot A1400 and PowerShot A2600. All three cameras incorporate a 16 megapixel sensor. While the PowerShots include the CCD type sensor, the IXUS 140 houses the BSI-CMOS kind. While the PowerShots offer 5x worth of optical zoom (28-140mm), the IXUS 140 sports a focal length of 28-224mm. All three cameras have a burst mode of 0.8 fps, so don’t be expecting to be able to shoot action or sports with these.
| Canon PowerShot A1400 (above) | |
| Canon PowerShot A2600 (above) | |
| Canon IXUS 140 (above) | |
