Minox's new SpyCam: is it the smallest decent digital camera?
Minox's SpyCam, a little wee digital Bond gadget about half the size of a normal digicam, is out in 6 days, 22 hours, 8 minutes and 15 seconds. At the time of writing, of course!
To be launched at Photokina, the cam has a 3.2 megapixel sensor, 128 MB of memory and a MicroSD card slot. It can shoot VGA movies, too. There's even a flash expansion unit, as the minuscule base doesn't have one.
What's always struck me about digital cameras is that most have a more-or-less identical form factor. Almost every consumer model is a little under an inch thick and about four inches long. Canon's squared-off Elph series is somewhat distinctive of the genre, while Casio's Exilims typically shave off a bit here and there compared to the competition. Minox's SpyCam, however, promises a severe drop in size, but without the 0.3-megapixel trappings of something horrible from the crapvendors.
Minox recently retired its TLX (pictured) and halved the retail price on remaining inventory, opening the way for September 24's replacement.
Countdown [Minox License to Shoot via Retrothing]
the latest
latest episodes
Like Hollywood mining old TV shows for source material, there are many great camera designs from the days of film that could work very well as digital cameras. The Minox spy camera is a classic old niche camera from the film era and it's nice to see Minox figure out that smallness and reto-cool are unclaimed territory in a world of me-too consumer digital cameras.
still better than an iphone camera
Sigh... I'm gonna miss the Minox film bodies... Anybody know if anybody is going to keep making film for them? Or are these going to go the way of my beloved collection of SX-70s?
Oh, great. Minox. Chewie, see what you can do.