Kodak Charmera review: fun for the moment
Toy cameras are back
Late last year, Kodak released a tiny $30 camera called the Charmera, which instantly went viral across several corners of the internet.
The Charmera is like the gashapon or Labubu of cameras; there are seven designs, and you don’t know which one you’re getting until you open the box. The “secret” transparent version is a one-in-48 special edition that wasn’t announced until after the Charmera shipped.
I have to applaud Kodak for its masterful hypebeast marketing, because the Charmera ended up completely sold out everywhere for several months after its release, and it only just went on sale here in Japan at normal pricing. Could it actually be a good camera?
Well, no. But it is an inspired piece of design, and I’m not surprised it’s proven to be so popular.
The Charmera is actually manufactured by Hong Kong-based camera company Reto, which sells a variety of casual film cameras. (One of its products is another revival of the cult-classic Vivitar Ultra Wide & Slim; I have a basically identical model from about 15 years ago by now-defunct Japanese company Superheadz. Highly recommended as a simple sunny-day 35mm point-and-shoot with a wide-but-usable 22mm lens.)
Where Kodak comes in is the inspiration for the design; the Charmera is based on the tiny Kodak Fling from 1987, which used Kodak’s ultra-compact cartridge-based 110 film format. The Charmera is even smaller than its design inspiration and can easily be attached to a keychain without being too obtrusive. In fact, one comes in the box. I’d compare the overall size to a shorter pack of chewing gum.
Obviously, that brings with it some ergonomic constraints. The “viewfinder”, for example, is literally just a hole that pokes through the camera from front to back and doesn’t give you much more indication of framing than basic guesswork.
The LCD screen on the back, meanwhile, is about half the size of a postage stamp and isn’t going to blow you away with its colour reproduction. It kind of reminds me of early flip phones in that regard, albeit a lot sharper and with better viewing angles. Ultimately it’s big enough for you to see your basic composition while also being small enough to discourage you from looking too closely, which is probably for the best.
The buttons are simple and intuitive. You have one each for power, playback and the shutter, as well as an up-down pair for switching through photos or filters. It’s hard to go wrong with the minimalist user interface, such as it is, though my one complaint is that you have to actively select whether to shoot photos or videos every time you turn the camera on.
The model I ended up with is like a Memphis design throwback, which is a neat reference for an ‘80s-inspired camera. I actually think they all look pretty great and wouldn’t have been particularly disappointed or psyched to get any of them over any of the others, except maybe the transparent one. Kodak and Reto definitely nailed the trims on all of these versions.
The bottom panel of the Charmera houses a USB-C port for charging and a microUSB card slot for storage. I repurposed a 4GB card from a Nintendo 3DS, which is good for more than 14,000 photos from the tiny 1/4” 1.6-megapixel sensor.
So, about that hardware. As you will no doubt be unsurprised to learn, it isn’t good in any conventional sense. The main reason to use the screen carefully is to make sure the Charmera has caught up with your framing — if you’re lining up a landscape, for example, it can take two or three seconds simply to make sure that the sky isn’t blowing everything out.
The 35mm-equivalent f/2.4 lens is fixed-focus, although that’s kind of a moot point on such a small sensor. You can generally forget about getting much of use in low light, even with the tiny LED flash that automatically activates in the dark.
To get creative shots out of the Charmera, you’ll want to leverage its built-in filters and frames. Here are the four standard colour options, which are basically “normal”, “warm”, “cool” and “monochrome”":
The next few options are more about framing than altering the exposure. Here’s one that evokes film sprockets:
And I kind of love this Windows 95-esque frame:
This one, meanwhile, is very meta and serves as a way to “zoom”, though the image processing is working overtime to deliver anything legible:
Finally, you also get some Game Boy Camera-esque 1-bit options:
As you can tell, this is not a good camera by any conventional metric. But I think it’s an excellent toy camera. Reto and Kodak figured out a cute, simple design that’s fun to use and is up to the task of capturing memories in an idiosyncratic way.
I was talking to my sister about the Charmera the other day, and she asked whether it’d be a good option for her son. With the caveat that I am not all that in touch with the proclivities of eight-year-olds, I said I thought it absolutely would be. I think anyone could enjoy using this camera — especially if they’ve never used anything better.
For much-older me, though, the Charmera is still cheap enough and well-designed enough to be worth shooting with on a few specific occasions and using as a keychain or a desk ornament the rest of the time. I am, dare I say, charmed by it.
As a consumer brand, Kodak has been through some rough times since the rise of digital photography. I remember annually visiting its booth at CES when I was with The Verge and cringing at every attempt at slapping its logo onto bad Android phones, or whatever the move was that year.
But the Charmera is a great example of how the company is reinventing itself. Kodak has also capitalised on the recent trend for compact cameras among Gen Z — the Pixpro FZ55 was the best-selling point-and-shoot in Japan last year, with three other Kodak models placing in the top 10.
I’m all for this. Toy cameras and retro-ish compacts are another antidote for the flat blandness of most smartphone photography. Any camera that gets people more engaged with the way they take photos can only be a good thing.
We here at Multicore believe in the tactile joy of hardware and the evocative impact of design. The Kodak Charmera may not take classically great pictures, but if you share those tenets, it’s probably worth $30.