It looks like one of those tabletop security cameras that will activate when it senses motion, start filming, and stream the feed to your phone. That, however, is not what it does. Instead, the Canon Powershot PX is meant to be a robot photographer that you can leave in your home to automatically take candid shots of scenes it deems worthy of being remembered. So yeah… it’s like a smart security camera. Except, instead of looking out for intruders, it scans the room for potentially memorable moments. When it senses one, it activates the shutter to immortalize the scene in either digital photos or 1080p video. We’re guessing this is the consumer version of the experimental Powershot Pick they crowdfunded earlier this year, by the way, so they’ve had time to make refinements to this over that time. 
The Canon Powershot PX is a stationary camera that can be placed on tables, shelves, and, pretty much, any flat surface where it can get a good view of what’s going on in a room. It can pan and tilt, moving its 35mm equivalent lens 340 degrees horizontally and 110 degrees vertically, allowing it to scan a room to find anything worth capturing. The onboard sensor can shoot stills in 11.7 megapixels and record video footage in 1080p at 60 fps, making it a viable replacement to pulling out your phone everything something fun goes down. Designed to do all its recording autonomously, it uses facial recognition to identify and prioritize individuals you want to keep in the frame for your stills and photos, all while relying on AI-based algorithms to determine which scenes are actually worth recording. That’s right, there’s no need to keep your phone in hand, so you can grab memorable pictures whenever you have a party at home – this thing will handle all that on its own, along with capturing candid shots of your family’s day-to-day lives. 
The Canon Powershot PX is powered by a rechargeable battery, so you can move this from one room to another without having to bother with finding an available power outlet. Heck, you can probably bring it to a party at the office or Sunday dinner at grandma’s, given how compact it is, making for a versatile camera that you can use as a robot photographer for many of your life’s important moments. All photos and videos are stored on a removable memory card, too, so you can have it filming at a long-running event and just switch to a new card every time it gets filled up. If you want to check on whatever captures it’s taken so far at any time, you can connect to the camera via a companion app (iOS and Android). It has both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, so it’s flexible in the kind of wireless connections you can make. 
While a life-logging camera isn’t exactly a new idea, we have a feeling it’s a category that’s just waiting for the right product to come. Whether it’s this one that gets it right or something else down the line, though, is another story entirely and something we’ll have to see going forward. The Canon Powershot PX debuts in Europe this November, priced at €500.