Kenko Tokina has announced the KC-WP06 compact camera. It’s the company’s newest dustproof and waterproof compact camera. It has an IP58 rating and a front-facing screen for shooting underwater selfies.
The IP58 rating means that it’s protected from “limited dust ingress” and complete submersion in water to a depth of 3.5 metres (11.5′). You won’t be deep-sea diving with it, but it should be fun for paddling or a dip in the pool.
Like most compact cameras, the compact and lightweight Kenko KC-WP06 (buy here) is designed as a pocketable walkabout camera. Something for you to take away on vacation with you that’s a bit more versatile than your smartphone. In principle, anyway.
It features an 8-megapixel 1/3.2 type CMOS sensor. Its tiny 3.37mm lens provides a field of view equivalent to a 25.5mm lens on a full-frame camera and has a fixed aperture of f/2.2. It’s a fixed focal length, offering 4x digital zoom.
Kenko Tokina KC-WP06 – Straight outta 2003
Despite releasing in 2023, the Kenko KC-WP06 looks like a camera from 2003, but with one notable exception. They’ve become quite the trend on action cameras over the last few years, but there aren’t many (any?) compact cameras with a front-facing LCD in addition to the standard rear LCD.
The front-facing display lets you quickly and easily shoot selfies. No longer do you need to shoot blind and hope you’ve managed to get yourself and your friends or family in the shot and in focus. Now, you can see it while you’re taking the shot.
Sure, you can shoot selfies with your smartphone, but this has an IP58 rating that lets you take it up to 3.5 metres underwater. While a number of smartphones these days are waterproof to some degree, most touchscreens don’t work all that well underwater.
Wide-angle, but not super wide
It sports a moderately wide-angle 3.37mm lens. This provides a field of view similar to a 25.5mm focal length on a full-frame camera. It’s not super wide, but it’s wide enough for most practical applications. And it shouldn’t give you that GoPro-style fisheye look, either.
On the rear is a 2.8″ LCD that doesn’t appear to be a touchscreen. Instead, there are several buttons for navigating through your options and menus. It shoots JPG and MJPEG AVI video to a microSD card up to a capacity of 128GB.
No 4K, obviously
The video resolution of the Kenko KC-WP06 isn’t particularly high. It’s not 4K, that’s for sure. It offers a maximum video resolution of 2688 x 1520 pixels. This is a slightly taller than 16:9 aspect ratio and higher resolution than 1080p, allowing for a little cropping, scaling or recomposition in the edit.
By today’s standards, it’s quite primitive. Even compared to a smartphone, it’s primitive. Its only real advantage is that it’s waterproof. Although, as mentioned earlier, you won’t be heading deep into the ocean with this camera.
Its IP58 rating only allows it to survive up to 3.5 metres (around 11.5 feet) underwater, although the company does say it can handle splashing around in the sea. So, a day at the beach, even in the water, isn’t out of the question. Or, it’s a handy camera to keep by the pool when you want to dive in.
Price and Availability
The Kenko Tokina KC-WP06 is a pretty basic camera, although it comes at a pretty basic price. It’s available to buy for ¥17,490 on the Kenko Tokina website, which is around $125. However, it’s not expected to start shipping until the end of July. There’s been no word yet on when or if the KC-WP06 will make it to retailers outside of Japan.
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