It weighs 86g, has just four buttons and is no bigger than a mobile phone. And under a deal secured between the German tabloid Bild and the discount supermarket Lidl, the simple-to-use digital camera is available while stocks last for just £61. If the editor of Bild has his way, the Creative Vado - which comes emblazoned with the newspaper's logo - is set to create a "media evolution".
Diekmann is encouraging Bild readers to buy the gadget in the hope that it will nurture a new generation of citizen video journalists - the camera shoots video as well as stills - who will use it to collect material and upload it directly to a special desk of content editors.
The scheme comes on the back of a highly successful two-year "volksjournalismus" (people's journalism) project in which readers have been encouraged to send in their pictures, with payment of €500 for each one published.
"We started it during the World Cup in 2006, encouraging people to send us their pictures, because we knew our journalists couldn't be everywhere at once," says Michael Paustian, deputy editor-in-chief of Bild. "It has been a huge success, so that we now get around 4,000 photos a day."
Around 9,000 of these pictures have been published in the paper - 1,000 of them as page-lead stories - while several tens of thousands have appeared on the website. There have been citizens' takes on everything from celebrity break-ups to the disabled interior minister Wolfgang Schauble doing his morning exercises in a specially converted wheelchair, Angela Merkel holidaying in Italy, or a policeman using his mobile phone at the wheel.
"Technology has improved to such an extent that we'd be foolish not to take advantage of it," says Paustian. "There's one button to turn it on, one to record, and zap, before you know it, the material is with Bild."
Ralph Oliver Graef, a Hamburg-based media lawyer, says: "It's based on the idea that Mr Everybody is everywhere - all he needs is to remember to take his camera with him. Potentially you now have 82 million German video journalists at large - it's quite scary."
Extending the volksjournalismus project to videos seems only natural. But it has unsurprisingly stoked the wrath of German organisations for journalists. "It does nothing to further the cause of journalism and is an invitation to break certain fixed boundaries. It will lead to many people trampling over others' rights as they lie in wait for celebrities," says Michael Konken, head of the German Journalists' Association (DJV). "Lay people don't know the first thing about the media codes, and if they misbehave while collecting their material, the next thing we know paid-up journalists will be paying the consequences by being excluded from events."
But Paustian says: "It's not the reader that makes the decision about what material we use. We've got people here to do that. We've only had three or four legal disputes surrounding the pictures within the last two years."
Graef says the phenomenon has caused a huge stir among professional photo- journalists - who would normally get around €200 for each published photograph. "They feel their profession is under attack."
Paustian insists that the project is not about cutting jobs. "The point of the citizen journalists is that they're at off-diary events to which journalists haven't been sent. At Bild it has created jobs - the specially established department which sifts through the picture material that's sent through to us employs 10 people."
Christian Meier, a German media expert, says the video reporter scheme throws up scores of legal questions, such as "who vets the pictures, who makes sure that personal rights and laws are not being broken, how do they deal with material that involves criminal activity which might not sometimes be apparent until after the material is published?"
But while encouraging citizen video journalism might lower the standards of the profession, Meier says it may also have the opposite effect. "It could lead to the improvement of standards as readers demand a higher quality - there is a big difference between a shaky video or blurred photo and good quality images."
Paustian cites the most popular download on Bild.de, a reader's recording of the crash landing of a Lufthansa Airbus at Hamburg airport in March. "Without the use of lay people we'd never have access to such images," he says. Other hits have included a DJ exposed for making a "Heil Hitler" greeting, as well as a walk in the woods by two leading Social Democrats at the height of a heated leadership battle.
A favourite last week was a naked couple discovered in a drunken coma in their garden by a neighbour, who also recorded the police arriving to take them away.
Which is hardly groundbreaking news. But Paustian says: "Our citizen reporters are a sensible extension and quite simply make journalism better and more interesting."