Camp Snap 8 (CS-8) Review: Pretty But Preposterous https://petapixel.com/2025/11/29/camp-snap-8-cs-8-review-pretty-but-preposterous/ #campsnap8videocamera #vintageinspired #familymemories #analogvideo #videography #Equipment #camcorder #giftideas #homevideo #toycamera #Reviews #lofi

Lens-Artists #375: Where to Find the Mysterious

This week it’s Patti’s turn to host the Challenge, and her theme is ‘Where to Find the Mysterious‘. On her blog, Creative Exploration in Words and Pictures, Patti writes, ‘When life is a bit crazy … I go out with my camera, hoping that someone or something catches my eye. … I’m searching for something beautiful, something I’ve never seen before, or something mysterious’.

Patti asks us to, ‘share your mysterious images captured for this challenge’, so I thought I would post a few images taken this afternoon and make no comments about them at all, except to say that they were taken with a toy camera, the Photo Creator MiniCam, with a variable neutral density (ND) filter at its maximum setting. The images were taken in colour, but you’d hardly know that from the results.

Themes for the Lens-Artists Challenge are posted each Saturday at 12:00 noon EST (which is 4pm, GMT) and anyone who wants to take part can post their images during the week. If you want to know more about the Challenge, details can be found here, and entries can be found on the WordPress reader using the tag ‘Lens-Artists’.

If you are on Mastodon, you can now follow this blog directly. Just go to Mastodon and follow the ‘Snapshot’ WordPress account at @keithdevereux.wordpress.com. All new posts will be automatically updated to your timeline.

#abstract #challenge #lensartists #themysterious #toycamera #canaltoys #lensArtists #lofi #minicam #photocreator

A Little Pole-arity With The Canal Toys Photo Creator MiniCam

Back when I was a kid, I really wanted an Action Man. My best friend, Alex, had one, and with all the accessories and uniforms we had a great time playing in his house and garden. I pestered my parents for ages, and eventually they relented and brought home … a Tommy Gunn. A what? This wasn’t Action Man! I got over my disappointment quite quickly, though, and whenever we went to the little toy shop in Upton we would always pick up something for Tommy Gunn.

It was a bit like this with the new ķeychain camera from Kodak, the Charmera. Launched a month or so ago, the Charmera, a basic 1MP camera with few bells and whistles except for some filters, has become the hot new item. I put off getting one straight away, and the next thing I knew there was no stock anywhere. To make it more difficult, I’m in Europe, and since the Charmeras are imported from the US, supplies were thin on the ground. I’ve been looking around, but there’s no sign of them anywhere. And then, purely by accident, I found the Canal Toys Photo Creator MiniCam.

Like the Charmera, the MiniCam is a Keychain camera. It’s actually smaller than the Charmera, and cheaper. I picked up mine from the local Continente supermarket for 11,99€ each. It’s also supposed to be of higher resolution than the Charmera. The reviews I’ve seen suggest the MiniCam has a 3MP sensor, but recently I came across a Reddit thread that suggested the MiniCam has a 2MP sensor and the 3MP images are interpolated, which judging by their fuzziness seems likely. Although I’ve exposed the images in this post at 3MP, I’m going to change the resolution to 2MP and see if that makes a difference. 

There are six different styles of the Minicam, all different colours, but inside they’re all the same. A sensor, rechargeable battery, a rear LCD screen, and sockets for a microSD card (included) and USB-C for data transfer and charging. I bought two, and have been trying to prise one open to see if I can get to the sensor to remove the IR cut filter or circuit bend it, but they seem to be securely glued together. On the top of the camera are two plastic buttons,  one for power and the shutter button, and on one side is a rocker switch which toggles between the fourteen film styles available.

After several rainy days, thanks to Storm Cláudia, the sun came out so I charged up the MiniCam, which takes about 20 minutes to achieve a full charge, and on the way back from a shopping trip stopped to take some images of telephone and electricity poles. Rather than trying out all of the filters, I stuck with the basic colour palette and the red filter option, which actually came out looking like redscaled colour film, though of course a lot more … fuzzier. Of course, I couldn’t resist trying one filter, which was amusing, although I don’t think I’ll  be trying that again. Oh, and there’s no way to turn off the date stamp, so it’s always in the image, whether you select a filter or not.

All of these images were taken at the 3MP resolution, though a couple of days later I thought I would see how the MiniCam would perform in infrared. As suggested in the Reddit post, I changed the resolution to 2MP and set out to my favourite tree, armed with the MiniCam and the Hoya 720nm infrared filter. I took a few images of the tree and the roundabout across the road, and was pleasantly surprised to find that these came out really well. The focusing was a little off, but I wasn’t too upset by that. I did find a couple of the images were quite blurred, but the lens and filter was all hand held, and it was unsurprising that I moved the camera a little bit when taking the exposures. Actually, the unintentional ICM images were my favourite of the whole exercise.

In conclusion, I quite liked messing around with the Canal Toys Photo Creator MiniCam. However, it certainly won’t become my carry around camera, and I’ve actually managed to find a Charmera available for pre-order. Hopefully, that will be with me by Christmas. I did come across a Bluesky post about connecting the Charmera with a USB-C cable to a smartphone to copy files directly to the phone, and this trick works with the MiniCam, too. In the meantime,  I’ll be trying to prise one of my MiniCams apart, just to see if I can either make it full spectrum or do a little circuit bending.

If you are on Mastodon, you can now follow this blog directly. Just go to Mastodon and follow my WordPress account at @keithdevereux.wordpress.com. All new posts will be automatically updated to your timeline on Mastodon.

#abstract #experimental #infrared #kodak #retro #toycamera #canaltoys #charmera #kodakcharmera #lofi #minicam #photocreator #vintagevibes

Trying to take a different lens with me each work day, and today I was faffing around with the "GIZMON Wtulens." The crop factor basically makes it a tele lens on this camera, and it has the misfortune of having a pretty tight fixed aperture, so really wanting a lot of light, but very difficult to focus with the screen in bright light. I feel like it would be a fun lens to use with a color-gelled ring-flash in party scenarios, but the crop factor makes that a bit of a non-starter. I have a few "toy" lenses specifically made for this camera that will likely fill that role better, and I'm not sure that I'll trot this one out very often in the future.

#photography #PentaxQ #ToyCamera