Bizarre new self-shooter from Canon

Someone at Canon’s been drinking a lot of coffee lately. Only caffeine could explain the splendidly bizarre and wonderful new “Legria Mini” camcorder.

Unlike any other conventional camcorder – or action cam – the tiny Mini is designed specifically for first-person filming. In other words, filming yourself. Normally this is an afterthough, achieved by flipping a camcorder’s LCD round. The Mini adopts it as its raison d’etre.

Looking rather like someone took a video projector and shrunk it in a hot wash, the Legria Mini has a very wide angle (160 degree – almost fisheye) lens; HD sensor; WiFi control, playback and streaming; and a tiddly little built in stand. The aforementioned lens can also be set to a more conventional 71 degrees for close-up work.

Forget holding the camcorder in your arm and pointing it at the world. This is designed to sit on a table in front of you, pointing back at you. It has a 2.7 inch capacitive touch screen, which flips out to the rear or subject side. A 1/2.3″ CMOS sensor should provide a decent enough image in less than optimal light – better than any webcam anyway, which might normally be employed for this sort of filming. A stereo mic is built in.

Ingeniously, and sensibly, the camera’s rotation detection switch system ensures the image is always displayed the right way up, no matter how the device is held.

WiFi can be used to control the camera, play recordings back, and upload or stream live to the Internet via a smartphone or tablet. Further functions include timelapse, fast and slow motion capture.

It’s going to be available from mid-September and will cost £269 GPB (329 Euros). Here it is in video: