TechRadar Reviewed Caira (and Said They’re Cancelling Lightroom)
First published January 2026. Updated September 2026: the Kickstarter has closed and Caira is on pre-order, and Generative Editing is now part of Caira Studio alongside Generative Video Editing.
Waking up to find TechRadar asking whether your camera has made Lightroom redundant is a good morning. Rashid Ahmad spent two weeks with one of 50 pre-production Caira units, and his review — I tested Caira, the first Nano Banana AI camera – now I’m cancelling my Lightroom subscription — was the first long test of the camera by someone who didn’t build it.
What he tested
Caira is a Micro Four Thirds mirrorless camera that attaches to an iPhone with MagSafe and connects over Wi-Fi to the Caira app. Photos land in your camera roll; there is no SD card and no import step. Rashid called it a “weird but impressive hybrid”, which we’re taking as a compliment. We set out to merge a proper interchangeable-lens camera with the phone you already carry, and hybrid is the honest word for that.
The workflow verdict
The line we’ve quoted most since: Caira “solves the ‘I’ll edit that later’ lie we all tell ourselves.” Anyone who has owned a mirrorless camera knows the lie. The SD card stays in the bag, the RAW files sit on a drive, and the photos from March get looked at in September. Caira’s answer is that the edit happens on the phone, in the moment, before you’ve left the table.
Generative Editing, seen by someone else
The feature Rashid spent longest on was Generative Editing, powered by Google’s Nano Banana model. He typed and spoke prompts like “make it nighttime” and “change his navy blazer to burgundy”, got results back in seconds, and wrote that it “feels like magic”. Watching a reviewer’s surprise at the speed was the moment our engineers had been waiting a year for. He was also clear that the camera underneath is real: a Micro Four Thirds sensor and mount that takes Panasonic, Olympus, Leica and Sigma lenses — “not a toy pretending to be a camera”.
On the subscription
We knew the subscription would be the hard part of any review. Rashid’s conclusion was that it is “…cheaper than what I pay for Lightroom, which I will now use a lot less”. That subscription has since become Caira Studio, which includes Generative Editing and, from this autumn, Generative Video Editing.
What’s changed since
The Kickstarter closed in December 2025 after passing its goal in under 24 hours, and Caira is now on pre-order with batches shipping monthly. In September 2026 we introduced Generative Video Editing, so the argument Rashid made about photos — edit it on the camera, in the moment — now applies to footage too.
Read the full review at TechRadar. Then see what Caira does today: Generative Editing, Generative Video Editing, or pre-order Caira.