REC Camera doesn’t separate you from the action

The invention of the digital camera revolutionized the way we vacation: all too often, we spend our free time staring down a viewfinder or at an LCD screen instead of looking around us. Well, there’s a concept design that hopes to change that: the REC Camera.

Designed by Dongyeon Kim and featured over on the Yanko Design blog, the REC Camera is an interesting twist on the traditional compact: all the usual features are there, including an LCD display on the rear and a shutter button on the top, but it’s a truncated shape – square, rather than the more usual rectangular design of a compact digital camera.

The reason for this becomes clear when the REC is fully deployed: the LCD display on the rear is transparent, and swings out to the side to act as a viewing window. Whatever you see in the window, that’s what you’re taking a picture of – and whatever you’re taking a picture of gets to see you, too.

The designer likens it to holding your fingers and thumbs together to form a frame: it doesn’t get in the way of what you’re viewing, but rather allows you to compose the shot in the best way that you can. While zooming would require the screen to activate, shots taken at a standard 35mm zoom equivalent will appear almost exactly as they did when you framed them in the ‘viewfinder.’

The transparent screen also serves a secondary purpose: when images have been taken, they can be reviewed on the display – and because it’s a transparent LCD, the image is viewable from both sides, allowing both the photographer and the subject to see exactly what was taken.

It’s a neat design, and one that means that the subject gets to see the face of his or her photographer rather than it being hidden behind a plastic box – and it’s well within the realms of possibility, with several companies working on transparent displays for exactly this kind of purpose. While the technology currently feels more like tinted glass than the totally invisible display used in Kim’s creation, fully transparent displays can’t be too many years away.

Sadly, the REC Camera could be at least that far away from reality. Currently, it exists only as an imagined prototype in the mind of the designer, and Kim has yet to announce any partnerships with hardware manufacturers to bring his creation to life – never mind to market.