This is the most revolutionary camera that Canon has ever made
The PowerShot V10 is the most revolutionary camera that Canon has ever made. There, I said it. Hell, it's the most revolutionary camera that I've seen from any of the major manufacturers in the past ten years.
In case you missed it (in which case, watch my video above or on YouTube here), the Canon PowerShot V10 is the company's first dedicated vlogging camera. And, I would argue, the first truly dedicated vlogging camera that's ever been made.
What do I mean by that? Well, take a look at the typical vlogging cameras – the Sony ZV-1 II, the Fujifilm X-S20, the Canon EOS R50. What do they all have in common? They're all just normal cameras with a flippy screen so you can see yourself.
They all have the same traditional camera body, that's designed to be held in two hands and operated from the rear of the camera. They all have the same lenses, either requiring you to change them (and buy them) depending on your needs, or to zoom them in and out by physically handling the camera. They all require you to dial in your exposure settings – at best choosing A or P mode to shoot automatically, and at worst asking you to wrestle with framerates and bitrates and everything else.
Again, they're all just normal cameras with a flippy screen so you can see yourself. There's nothing about them that actually makes them proper vlogging cameras. Honestly, your smartphone is a more purpose-built vlogging camera.
And that's what makes the PowerShot V10 so revolutionary. Canon hasn't just taken yet another standard stills camera and simply marketed it at vloggers – come on, nobody wants to hold a camera backwards, with the grip in the wrong place and not enough purchase and the balance all wrong! It's completely stupid!
No, Canon has gone away and designed, from the ground up, a camera whose sole purpose is capture imagery in a specific way. It's what GoPro did, with the original Digital Hero in 2006. It's what Ricoh did, with the original Theta in 2013. And it makes my heart sing. Because as has been made clear, traditional entry-level cameras have been replaced by vlogging cameras – and Canon is the first company to actually put something on the market that fits the brief.
Will it catch on? That's harder to say. The reaction from traditional photographers and even camera journalists has been lukewarm. They don't understand the V10, because it's not intended for them – it's not intended for someone whose idea of a vlogging camera is to set up a Panasonic GH6 on a gimbal with an Atomos Ninja and all the right codecs.
It's designed for the new breed of camera buyer – someone who is coming from a phone, where you don't mess around with any of those things, where you just put your phone in front of you and press the record button. Give that GH6 setup to a non-camera buff and they won't know where to begin; give that same person a V10 and they'll figure it out in seconds.
I hope it takes off. It deserves to. And Canon deserves the highest of high fives for doing something daring, different and defiant.
Check out the best lenses for vlogging with your existing camera, along with the best Canon cameras that the manufacturer makes in the non-vlogging sphere.
