Those clever camera manufacturers will stop at nothing to enhance our lives, and increase the already near-unbearable mirth of the everyday, by means of clever electronics. And so to London’s Imagination Gallery this afternoon, where Samsung was showing off its latest round of cameras. The most interesting of which sports not one screen, but quite literally double that number. Yes that’s right, two screens! One on the back (soooo last season) and one implausibly positioned (hold on to your seats) at the front. And look how happy it seems!

Not quite as daft an idea as I’d initially thought, though. A highly scientific survey of Facebook that I just conducted has revealed that 32.3% of all photos contain the picture-taker themself, in that highly endearing cuddling-up-to-your-other-half/friend/total stranger, sticking your arm out and taking the picture backwards sort of way. The screen on the front of the ST500 and ST550 models lets you do it without taking half a dozen shots of the tops of your heads first. Obviously, in the picture you see on the left, all the front screen is showing is a picture of a camera. This is because I was taking a picture of it at the time. Imagine, instead, a happy scene with laughter and smiling.

But wait, there’s more! Not only will the front-mounted screen mirror what the lens can see, it’ll do other things too. It’ll show you a numerical countdown for self-timer shots, or a happy smiling face to indicate to your friends exactly when the camers is about to take the shot, so they can pretend to be happy too, and smile.

Best of all, it will (if Samsung is to be believed) make your children photogenic no matter what. It will manage this trick by showing a terrifically cute animation of a clown on the front screen, thus ensuring the little blighter darling will be enraptured, smile delightedly and radiate angelic photo-friendly happiness at just the right moment.

There’s even going to be a facility to download new animations to the camera, which will – as our Samsung spokesman so eloquently intoned – “reinvigorate the product in terms of the child mode function”. Indeed.

Also on the agenda were Samsung’s newest camcorders, reviews of which will be gracing this site soon. Apparently, while the sale of hard-disk camcorders has been falling, flash-memory-based ones are on the up. And little wonder given their small size. And also their ruggedness, since according to our Samsung man, “a hard-drive product, you shake it about and the needle will skip”.

Well, quite.