Smartphone cameras have gotten pretty good in recent years, to the point where they’ve largely replaced point-and-shoot cameras for many folks. While there’s still a market for professional-quality DSLR and mirrorless cameras, camera companies like Canon are looking for other ways to engage non-professional photographers.

Enter the Canon IVY REC, a tiny, portable camera that uses the same sort of small image sensor you’d find in a smartphone, but which stuffs it into a USB flash drive-sized device with a carabiner clip.

The camera’s not available for purchase yet, but Canon plans to run a crowdfunding campaign for the unusual new device soon.

Details are a bit scarce at the moment, but here’s what we know about the Canon IVY REC.

It features a 13MP 1/3 inch CMOS sensor and it can shoot 1080p video at up to 60 frames per second. It supports Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and you can pair it with a smartphone app to view a preview of your shot on your phone (because the IVY REC is too small to have a screen or viewfinder).

You can also transfer photos and videos to your phone wirelessly.

Of course, if you have your phone handy, it’s not clear why you’d want to use this external camera… unless it manages to snap better shots than the built-in camera on your mobile device. But Canon isn’t making any promises on that front just yet.

They IVY REC is also waterproof and can handle up to 30 minutes in water up to 3.3 feet deep. And it has a rugged design and a clip that means you can take the camera just about anywhere.

Canon is offering up to 30 percent off the eventual price for early-bird backers of the upcoming Indiegogo campaign. But since we don’t actually know the price yet, we also don’t know how much that discount will save you.

There’s no word on the storage capacity, battery life, or even the exact size or weight yet. We should know more closer to launch.

via DPReview

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7 replies on “Canon IVY REC is a USB flash drive-sized camera (crowdfunding)”

  1. I like the form factor but it needs to be able to transmit a video feed with as little latency as possible to a reasonably priced near eye display, while receiving external power, to be useful for what I have in mind.

  2. If it is cheap enough and has enough battery life I can see a use for this. There are still a lot of smartphones out there that are not waterproof. Just because it uses a smartphone sensor doesn’t mean it will take the same quality photos. Much of the quality comes from the software. I think it needs some protection for that lens. I can see these getting banged around a lot and with no protection the lens won’t last long.

  3. The clip looks to be the major feature of this. I assume you clip it onto something and let it record like a gopro, or maybe this is like a consumer version of a body cam. Those are not things that you’d use your cellphone camera for, and you wouldn’t use this for things that you would just use your cellphone camera for.

    1. Yeah, but the battery life is going to be atrocious.
      Unless you pair it with a Raspberry Pi, and set the program to take a photo (instead of video) when the sensor detects movement. Like a “wildlife cam”. But we’re not sure if this device would even let you do something like that software-wise.

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