As smartphones have made photography more accessible than ever, a small Japanese company is taking a radically different approach to capturing memories. The Kyu camera, launched in Japan in late 2024 and now available for pre-order in the U.S., wants to challenge our relationship with digital memories through an intriguingly restrictive design philosophy.
What Is the Kyu Camera?
Born in Kyoto, Japan in 2022, Kyu is more than just another camera manufacturer — it’s a company with a mission to transform how we preserve our most precious moments. Its debut product, the Kyu camera, is an elegant, orb-shaped device designed by an ex-Canon employee (and supported by designers and engineers from almost every other camera company) that strips away the complexity of modern cameras to focus on one simple goal: capturing meaningful memories.
The Kyu camera’s minimalist design features a 13-megapixel primary sensor on the back and an 8-megapixel front-facing camera. A 1.5-inch circular LED touchscreen, a small microphone, and a single button comprise the entire front interface. That’s it.
The simplicity of the camera is intentional — there’s no learning curve or complex settings to master: just pure focus on capturing the moment. These intentional limitations are what makes the Kyu camera unique. The biggest of these limitations is that users can only record up to nine seconds per video clip, with a daily limit of 27 videos. This isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. The number nine (or “kyu” in Japanese) is central to the company’s philosophy, representing the sweet spot between capturing a moment’s essence and maintaining manageable content.
Both cameras record at 1080p at 30 frames per second (FPS) in a 1:1 square aspect ratio. While this might not compete with the latest smartphone cameras, the video quality is effectively as good as it needs to be for the intended purpose. It also reinforces Kyu’s philosophy that the emotional value of a memory matters more than technical perfection.
The Kyu camera also doesn’t take photos: it only captures video. Also, everything is managed on the camera from a single button.
“When considering updates for Kyu, the features we ‘don’t include’ are as important as or more important than those we do include,” the company says. “For example, we don’t provide video editing tools for expressing creativity. There are no ads at all. There’s no endlessly scrolling feed with unnecessary emotionally provocative content. The ‘Kyu app’ makes it easy to organize and share recorded videos.”
Once you’re done capturing memories, you can easily separate the removable 32GB memory unit from the bottom of the camera and plug it directly into your phone (via USB-C) to offload footage. The camera pairs with the Kyu app to help you organize all of your video clips into corresponding days and it can even stitch highlight reels of your clips together for you.
The camera’s unique form factor, while aesthetically pleasing and spherical to symbolize the interconnectedness of memories, does present only a minor opportunity for improvement. I found myself often worried that I would drop the Kyu camera while using it because of how smooth and rounded the edges are. It would be nice to see ergonomic features, like finger grooves, rubber traction pads, or a wrist strap, be addressed in future iterations by the Kyu team.
Kyu Camera Review: The App Experience
As with all cameras of this generation, the Kyu camera comes with a corresponding app that completes the experience. Once you’ve taken videos on your Kyu camera, you can (as mentioned) easily detach the removable memory unit and plug it directly into your phone. The memory unit is automatically detected by the app and it will immediately start downloading all of your videos. The download speed is a little slower than I’d like it to be, but it’s easy to set it and forget it until it is complete.
My initial experience with the app was admittedly a little confusing, but I later learned that it was due to user error as opposed to outright app defects. The issue right now is that the app doesn’t properly explain itself to the user, which can be frustrating. This can be ironed out relatively easily though, so I won’t hold it against the company at this stage.
After a clarifying conversation with the founder during the review process, the intentional design choices began to make sense. The app does exactly what it says it can do — nothing more and nothing less. Unlike traditional social media platforms, the Kyu app creates a more intimate sharing experience where your memories are only visible to whoever you invite to view them. As mentioned earlier, the app also allows you to stitch together your clips into automatically created highlight reels, helping creators and non-creators create coherent narratives from their daily captures.
Kyu Camera Review: A Highly Specialized Capture Device
In an era where we’re drowning in digital content, the Kyu camera offers a refreshing alternative to content creation simply for the sake of memory preservation. By limiting how much we can capture, it encourages us to be more present and intentional about the moments we choose to memorialize. While its constraints might seem restrictive to some, others might find it helpful to have a device solely dedicated to helping us focus on what truly matters in our daily lives.
The Kyu camera isn’t trying to compete with your smartphone’s camera or professional equipment. Instead, it’s creating its own category, mindful memory capture, for you and those who matter to you. For those feeling overwhelmed by endless camera rolls and social media feeds, this might be exactly the reset they need.
“Ordinary days spent with friends — everything felt fresh and exciting in those younger years. Those hazy memories can be captured and preserved through Kyu,” the company says. “You can share them with loved ones, look back on them time and again. Simple recordings transform into cherished memories, becoming a story that supports you. We created this camera to help you preserve those memories in the best way possible.”
The real question, of course, is if it’s successful at what it sets out to do. I’m so used to using my smartphone to achieve similar results that I found the Kyu to be almost redundant. With my phone, I can do much of the same stuff and that means fewer devices to carry, fewer steps to get workable footage (you don’t have to import to your phone because it’s already on there), and I have the intrinsic versatility to share anything I capture with selected friends or share on social without needing to plug them into the Kyu app experience.
I feel like Kyu is aiming squarely at my generation as a target but I actually feel like it will appeal more to either a much older demographic who isn’t as closely tied to their phones (since it does all the work for them to put the clips together and it’s simpler to use than an iPhone) or someone younger who isn’t a “creator” or creative-savvy because, again, the simplicity and automation of the process means anyone can do it.
The Kyu camera is priced at $299 and is currently available for pre-order in the United States. With 400 units already shipped in Japan, the company is planning to begin US deliveries in July 2025, though exact delivery dates may vary.
The Kyu Camera Goes All-In on Embracing a Niche
The Kyu Camera will eventually be a part of a wider group of interconnected products. For example, the company is working on a companion product called the Kyu Touch, a physical device for viewing content captured on Kyu Camera. It, like the camera, is very specific in its design and purpose.
The company’s philosophy is very much like how someone once described Japanese cooking: rather than adding ingredients to make a meal taste better, the prevailing theme of Japanese preparation is to instead ask how much can be taken away and be left with something delicious. Kyu has stripped itself extremely far back into just the absolute bare necessity of a single task, which is counter to how basically every camera or electronic device is designed today. It is a highly focused product but that means it’s not particularly adaptive to different needs, desires, or use cases.
That will either resonate greatly with a user or immediately turn them off. It’s hard to see a middle ground.
Are There Alternatives?
While you could say that the Kyu competes with every smartphone and camera on the market, that would be overly reductive. Yes, it’s a camera, but it’s also offering a unique user experience that isn’t found anywhere else. The closest I can think of is the original value proposition of Snapchat since that limited the time you can capture a clip, but “captures short video clip” doesn’t really adequately explain what Kyu does and with Snapchat, those memories are by design fleeting.
Kyu doesn’t want you to have memory FOMO and all clips are preserved provided you want to preserve them. In that sense, it’s more like a combination of Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses and Snapchat, except it’s not plugged into a giant public social network.
Should You Buy It?
Maybe. The price is just in the range where someone is going to think about it just a bit longer before hitting the “buy” button and you have to be a very specific type of person to appreciate what Kyu camera offers. But if this type of unique memory preservation resonates with you, there isn’t anything else quite like the Kyu camera.
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