Kodak Charmera review: A nice Keychain camera that’s beyond old-fashioned

The Kodak Charmera is a camera for your keychain. The thumb-sized camera, which is smaller than a roll of film, can capture photos and videos. Given to Low price $35 Its size is small, and the performance is modest.

The camera is great, and comes in several different designs with varying levels of vintage. Not that you get to choose: Charmera is sold as a blind box, like a collectible toy. As a gift or a fun toy, the Chamira has a cool design and is a great conversation starter. If people see you using it, they’ll be curious. As a camera, though, it’s… something.

Specifications and hardware

• Image resolution: 1.6 MP (1,449 x 1,080 pixels)
• Video resolution: 1,440 x 1,080, 30 fps
• Sensor size: 1/4 inch
• Lens: 35mm, f2.4
• Image stabilization: LOL, no
• Screen size: 0.96 inches
• Storage: Micro SD
• Weight: 30 grams (1.1 ounces)

The Charmera is technically a camera. Not a good idea, mind you, but it takes pictures. Shockingly, for its size and price, it can even record video. It does both of those things about as well as I can run a half marathon, which is to say, not very well, and the result is not pretty.

Given the presence of microSD storage and a USB-C port, it’s actually better equipped than the Some of the budget cameras I’ve reviewed. There is no bluetooth or wifi. To get photos from the Charmera, you need either a card reader or a USB-C cable to connect directly to your phone. Sometimes this works. Obviously, large capacity microSD cards confuse the phone or the Charmera or both. Given the size of your images and your camera’s capabilities, you don’t need a card with a lot of storage space or fast performance.

Like almost all modern Kodak products, the Charmera is not actually manufactured by Kodak; The manufacturer licenses the name only. The actual company is Hong Kong-based RETO Production, which makes a variety of retro-themed cameras. The most fascinating part of her design for the Charmera is the combination of blind boxes and what I have to assume are manufactured rarities. For the second point, she may actually be selling more than she can make. They have constantly sold out, with people unable to buy them anywhere, despite or because of the growing hype (on my part, guilty, I guess). It’s definitely one way to increase demand. People want what they can’t have.

This aspect of scarcity is combined with blind boxes. There are seven different camera designs. They’re all good, but some are better than others. However, the box looks the same, so you can’t know what you’re getting until you open it. It adds a little excitement and potential disappointment to the purchase, and for some people, I’m sure it also means they’re buying more than one. Honestly, it’s clever marketing, and it seems to work.

Charmera’s tiny 1/4-inch image sensor may solve the mystery of where recycled electronics go because it appears to have been transported back in time, straight from leftover ’90s gear, but more on that in a moment. To give you an idea of ​​how small “small” camera sensors are in something like inexpensive Kodak FZ55 They are of the 1/2.3 inch type, which is equivalent to the actual chip size 7.7 mm diagonally. The Charmera sensor measures 4.5 mm diagonally or 1/8 inch. This would make the nail on your pinky finger look huge in comparison.

This is as small an image sensor as possible, so it wouldn’t capture a lot of light even if it had an amazing lens, which it doesn’t. The lens, which is also small and I assume plastic, has a stated focal length of 35mm (35mm equivalent), but in my testing, it seemed closer to 50mm, which is a narrower field of view than the main camera on most phones.

Ease of use and image quality

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The Charmera has the worst image quality of any camera I’ve ever used. This includes digital cameras from the 1990s. I didn’t think it was possible for any modern image sensor to take photos this bad. It looks like 8p drunk on Everclear trying to put together a recognizable shape. They look like they were finger-drawn by an impressively untalented child. They are digital images painted by an impressionist painter who believes Monet is pronounced “Mon-ett.” (I will continue and you will not be able to stop me)

You’ll have a better idea of ​​what I was photographing if I described it to you in a language you don’t know. I think after designing Charmera, all the marketing was done, the product shipped in the morning, and one of the designers jumped upright in bed at 3 a.m., wiping the cold sweat from his forehead, and shouting, “Oh, crap! He needs to take pictures already!” Then they went back to sleep thinking they would deal with it in the morning.

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So after all that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln? Actually, this thing is pretty cool. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a terrible camera. I’m not sure how I could “get it wrong” after the previous paragraphs, but here’s the thing: as a conversation starter, and as a fun game, Chamira is great. I haven’t had one in a long time, but my girlfriend has had one for a few months, and she asks about it all the time. He – she It seems amazing.

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For such a small budget camera, there are a surprising number of buttons (maybe that’s where the budget has gone?). At the top are the shutter button and the power button which also activates the menu. On the back, next to the small screen, are the navigation buttons, as well as a button that enters playback mode.

There are no settings to speak of, other than including a date stamp on photos or videos. There are a range of different filters, ranging from very warm to very cool styles, as well as black, white and a few others. Most interesting are the frames that you can place over your photo. One of these looks like something taken straight out of MS Paint from Windows 3.1, which tells me that the designers of this camera either knew exactly what they were designing or at least had a sense of humor.

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The small screen works well enough to line up your shots. If that’s too useful for you, there’s a smaller viewfinder with no lens, literally just a square hole in the body, in case you want to attract more attention to yourself and/or look cool in someone else’s photo taken with a better camera. In the corner opposite the Charmera, there’s a small LED “flash” that does little better than suggest light at distances of more than a few feet.

Zoom in on the image

Video is also bad, no surprise there, but it looks less like something is wrong and more like a mediocre camera from the mid-2000s. Think early about YouTube. It’s 1,440 x 1,080, so it’s technically HD, but like images, it’s soft and desaturated. It also saves in avi file format which phones may not read. My assumption is that the image sensor takes 640 x 480 (possibly lower) photos and videos and converts them to 1440 x 1080. That’s not the point. I think these look much worse than anything close to 1080p.

charm

Look, Chamira is fun, and it’s $35. I’m not going to talk to anyone about some harmless fun for $35. As a camera, no, this is terrible, even by standards Cheap digital cameras. Like a toy, or a trinket, or a charm (Oh, I bet this Where the name comes from), it’s very cute.

Can you use photos on social media? Yes, I think you can see the images above and decide if this matches your Instagram aesthetic. It’s beyond what I call “retro” unless you’re trying to emulate the image quality of the world’s worst webcam. If so, the witch will fix it.