Captain Microchip

This column is about Casio’s radically designed Tryx camera and a defense of single-purpose gadgets. Now that smartphones get smarter we are inclined to take pictures, shoot videos and record audio using those robust phones. Personally, I like separate devices because I think they do their task better than all-purpose devices. Then again, I wear a bulky Orvis vest with all those single-purpose devices so I don’t appear very sleek.
The Tryx is a very simple camera that sells for $250. It has only two buttons. It has no optical zoom. It doesn’t have an image stabilizer. You can’t set the aperture or shutter speed. Casio is calling it “the Flip of still cameras.” People loved the Flip because it worked. You pressed the big red button on the back and you didn’t have to mess with tapes, disks, menus, mode dials or flipping out a screen.
There were two million Flips sold in the first six months. Unfortunately, Cisco bought Flip and then killed it. Luckily, the Flip will be around until 2013, and I expect to buy another one for old time’s sake. Cisco shut down the whole division and fired 550 people. The rationale: “Smartphones killed it. Nobody needs a dedicated recording machine when the phone can record video.”
Phone photography, phone video and phone GPS have their places. In my view they don’t replace single-purpose gear in their traditional roles. The Tryx is dedicated to a single purpose, and it looks exactly like an iPhone: a thin, black slab. You can use it that way, holding it as you would an app phone, but the outer edge is a sturdy rectangular frame. The body of the camera connects to a hinge at one end of it. Once the camera body is rotated away from its starting position, you can also tip it up or down 270 degrees on a second pivot point, so that it points more toward the sky or the ground. The swiveling camera clicks at 90-degree stopping points, but there’s enough friction that you can stop it at any point. You can use the frame as a tripod and you can use the frame as a hanger, so the camera dangles from a branch or nail for stable shooting. There’s a self-timer, of course, but also a really cool motion-activated shutter. When you’re capturing video, you can grip the empty frame as a handle. It looks like you’re holding a traditional camcorder, since the camera body flips 90 degrees away in either direction. Its Slide Panorama mode lets you whip the camera around you in space; it snaps many photos and then stitches them together into one enormously wide panorama, instantly and incredibly well. Your panorama can capture a full 360-degree circle around you.
The touch screen harbors a few tricks. Instead of using the tiny shutter button next to the screen, you can tap anywhere on the screen itself to fire the shot. You can use two-finger, iPhone-style pinch-and-spread techniques to zoom into a photo you’ve taken. You can drag across the screen to flip through your pictures.
The photos are slightly better than a phone’s, but not as good as those from a Canon pocket camera. Many of the Tryx’s ideas—the wave shutter, multi-touch screen, the frame concept, 360-degree panoramas—deserve to live on in other, future cameras. The Tryx is great looking, super slim, a blast to use and almost Flip-simple, and that is worth your consideration.