The Kodak MC3 debuted in 2001 as a compact little box that couldn’t pick which hat to wear. Kodak advertised it as the MC3 Portable Multimedia Device, which accurately characterized the device’s lofty but rather erratic purpose. This tiny box contained digital photos, short video clips, and MP3 tracks, all in one neat little package, years before only the most daring gadget users would even consider merging those functions.
James Warner once owned one of those giant Kodak picture-making machines that dominated every drugstore and big-box retailer in the 1990s and early 2000s. You’d walk up to it, insert a memory card or CD, scroll through all of the photographs on the screen, select the ones you liked, maybe add a cool border or some color correction, and walk out with your freshly printed photos just a few minutes later. These machines provided rapid pleasure at a period when home printers struggled with quality and affordability.
The DJI Mic Mini (2 TX + 1 RX + Charging Case), priced at $79 (was $169), is a tiny wireless microphone device that is ideal for content creators who want to eliminate muffled or distant sounds from their phone or camera microphones. To be honest, there are occasions when you just need to capture clean voices in your videos, interviews, or streams, and this small setup does the job without breaking the bank or taking up too much room.
DJI’s Osmo Mobile 8, priced at $126 (was $149), significantly improves the quality of everyday phone videos, making them more stable and smooth rather than jittery and jerky. Whether you’re publishing family films, chronicling your travels, or simply sharing short snippets, footage that doesn’t bounce around is a game changer.
In 2004, a small camera attached to a standard glasses frame appeared almost completely normal at first glance. However, few people did a double take when they first saw it. What was this little gadget? The Deja View Camwear 100 had quietly introduced a now-familiar concept: capturing video from the wearer’s perspective while leaving their hands free.
Dreame, the company behind all those robot vacuums (!) has just thrown a fork into the action camera market. At CES 2026, they debuted the LEAPTIC Cube, a tiny device capable of shooting 8K video while remaining compact.
Swapping a camera battery is a fairly routine task for any photographer, but up on the International Space Station, it’s about the most low-key physics lesson you could ever hope for. NASA astronaut Don Pettit, the man behind some of the most incredible orbital photography, took a few minutes to demonstrate how it’s done from above.
Off the distant coast of Western Australia, where the water stretches out into the enormous expanse of the Indian water, there is a natural beauty so exact and awe-inspiring that you can’t help but wonder if it was computer-generated, all digital creation to one set of eyes. Four separate wave peaks crash into a shallow reef at the same moment, curling in from all angles and then slamming into each other perfectly symmetrically, spraying water up to 70 meters or more into the sky.
Arkansas vehicles traveling through highway construction zones will soon face an entirely new level of scrutiny, and it has arrived a little earlier than intended. Work zone cameras that are now catching speeders will begin checking to see if someone is distracted while driving by a cell phone or other handheld gadget in mid-January 2026.
