I have more than 5,500 photographs in my camera roll right now – and that’s largely just the images that I’ve shot on my iPhone over the last year or so. Odds are, a lot of those images won’t get revisited often, or at all. But that’s exactly the inspiration behind a strange new camera called the Kyu.
Kyu is a Japanese startup, and its first product – a camera by the same name – is an extreme example of minimalist tech. The camera only takes videos up to 9 seconds long, doesn’t take photos at all, and limits users to taking up to 27 videos a day.
The reason behind the minimalism is keeping those memories from getting lost in the midst of the increasingly large amounts of data stored on hard drives and clouds that are likely to never get a second look.
The concept isn’t unheard of – the Fujifilm X Half, for example, has a film mode that limits the options until a full “roll” has been filled.
ABOVE: See the Kyu camera in action in Teo Crawford's brilliant video
The design of the Kyu looks more like an odd remote control than a camera – or as YouTuber Teo Crawford described it, it looks like what would happen if “Apple, Tomagotchi, and a Nikon Coolpix had a baby.” There’s just one button on the back, the rest of the controls are through gestures on the Kyu’s circular screen.
There are actually two cameras built into the egg-shaped device. The front camera is a 1/4-inch 8MP Sony sensor and the rear camera is a 1/3.06-inch 13MP Sony sensor. Video quality is only up to FullHD 30p. There’s removable USB-C storage and the device also has an Android app.
The company calls the Kyu a “just enough camcorder.”
The Kyu camera is available for pre-order from the company's website, with shipping estimated for sometime in the fourth quarter of 2025.
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