Casio WQV-1 Wrist Camera
A digital camera still isn’t a feature you’ll find on modern smart watches (you’ll need a chunky $300 strap to add that functionality to an Apple Watch), but back in 2000, Casio made that idea a reality with the WQV-1 Wrist Camera. As you can imagine, it was chock full of compromises. Photos were limited to 0.025-megapixel, 16-bit greyscale snaps, but it meant you could squeeze 100 of them onto the watch’s 1MB of memory. The screen was equally low-res, but still allowed users to browse their camera rolls, while a built-in IR transmitter and receiver allowed the WQV-1 to wirelessly send snaps to a PC or another wrist cam. Everything about this watch was a disappointment, which probably explains why companies still don’t make wrist-worn cameras even today.
