At this week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where tech companies showcase their latest innovations every January, one concept stood out to me among all others: a compact, flip-open camera designed not to capture memories or take a great photo of your lunch, but to monitor your meals. The Amazfit V1TAL Food Camera sits beside your plate during dinner and automatically logs what you eat, how much, and even how quickly you consume it.
Let's not mince words (so to speak). This strikes me as a very weird concept. But at the same time, I'm now reaching the age where health and nutrition are becoming important things to pay attention to. But it's not like I'm ever going to start keeping a notebook of everything I eat, so maybe this might actually be useful. Maybe it might even save my life...
More broadly, the V1TAL represents an interesting application of imaging technology to a problem that has nothing to do with traditional photography. It's also a reminder that computational photography is expanding far beyond phones and cameras into unexpected areas of daily life.
How it works
The V1TAL looks like something from a sci-fi movie, with its retro-futuristic design reminiscent of classic communicators or vintage folding cameras. You place it 20-25cm from your plate, activate Dining Mode, and eat normally. The camera captures periodic images throughout your meal, then syncs them to Amazfit's Zepp app where AI algorithms analyze the contents.
The computational photography challenge here is substantial. The system needs to identify ingredients from varied angles and lighting conditions, estimate portion sizes in three dimensions, calculate what's been consumed versus what remains, and do all this accurately enough to be useful for nutrition tracking. It's food photography-meets-machine vision, with the added complexity of tracking changes over time as the meal progresses.
To address the obvious privacy concerns, Amazfit has confirmed that the device will blur faces and won't record sound. But the idea of a camera observing your meals might still intrusive in ways a wrist-worn fitness tracker doesn't.
Serious project
The V1TAL first appeared at CES 2025 so the fact that Amazfit has brought it onto the show floor again, one year, is a sign that it's serious about developing it.
Amazfit already makes fitness watches and recently added photo-based food logging to its smartphone app. The V1TAL extends that idea by removing the need to pull out your phone and manually photograph meals. Instead, the camera will capture it automatically, capturing multiple images and analyzing eating patterns such as speed and meal composition.
They're not the only brand interested in this space, by the way: Garmin announced its own nutrition tracking feature this week, though its is entirely app-based without dedicated hardware.
A camera for everything
Amazfit hasn't committed to a release date, price, or final specifications. And honestly, whether consumers even want this level of automated tracking remains to be seen.
Ultimately, the V1TAL raises broader questions about where imaging technology fits in daily life. Cameras in phones made sense because they replaced dedicated devices people already carried. Cameras in doorbells and security systems serve clear safety functions. But a camera that watches you eat occupies stranger territory, even if the technical execution is impressive.
For anyone interested in camera technology, though, it's a fascinating example of computational photography solving problems far removed from traditional picture-taking.
Check out our less-radical recommendations for the best cameras for food photography
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