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.
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