Filling The Gaps: The Kodak Charmera, A Keychain Digital Camera

It’s the ‘must have’ camera of late 2025, so of course, I must have one. The Kodak Charmera is a small ‘keychain’ camera. As many have observed,  it’s small. Just a few cm long and maybe 15mm wide, the Charmera has a 1.6MP sensor and a tiny little screen. The controls are minimal, an on/off button, which also doubles as a menu button, the shutter button, and three buttons on the back. One for playback/select items and two toggle buttons that cycle through the different filters.

There’s no shutter speed selection, which is fixed at around 1/30s, and pressing the shutter makes a synthesised shutter sound that’s not all that loud, so sometimes you’re not actually sure if an image has been taken. Images are stored on a microSD card (not included), and apparently it’ll accept cards up to 32GB. Since file sizes are relatively small, I’m running my Charmera off a 1GB microSD card filched from the cheap Photo Creator MiniCam. That’s enough room for thousands of images, although I tend to download mine after each outing with the camera.

The appeal of the Charmera is it’s lo-fi aesthetic, although the Shitty Camera Challenge community have pounced on it as a ‘normal’ Shitty-compliant camera, to great effect. Other in the US, everyone seemed to be getting them, but over here in Europe they’re much hard to get. Also, there’s a premium, the $30 Charmera is more like 40—50€, depending on where you shop. They also run out really quickly. Fortunately,  I managed to nab two from the second run in November, and have a third on order at the moment.

There are six different designs of the Charmera, with a seventh transparent design as a ‘special’, and they’re sold in ‘blind’ boxes, so you don’t actually know which one you’ve got until you open the box. This is kind of half the fun, the rest is fiddling around with the camera. On the bottom of the device, next to the microSD card slot, is a USB-C socket for charging the camera or transferring files. I have a recent Android phone and it’s easy to transfer files from the Charmera to my phone, though apparently with some older phones this is not that straightforward.

So how does it perform? Not too shabbily really. It’s definitely better than the Photo Creator MiniCam, another keychain camera that I picked up recently, although actually taking a photo takes practise. Instead of pushing the shutter firmly, you just need to tap the button to take an image. Colour images came out nicely, though there’s nothing too exciting about them, but a lot more fun can be had with the filters. Like a lot of users, I’ve settled with the ‘grey’ filter, which is a two-tone grey and black image. There are a number of these, red, blue, and yellow, but I like the grey one.

One thing I did wonder, as I do with all my cameras, is what it’s infrared sensitivity is like. The Charmera is a cheap camera, and I hoped that this cheapness extended to the IR cut filter used on this little camera. I set the camera to black and white, held a 720nm infrared filter over the lens (and covered the’flash’ LED to prevent any light interference), and took a snap. It was great! At the same time I took black and white images with red, green, and blue filters, to make digital aerochromes and trichromes. These came out pretty darned good, too.

So what next for the Charmera? I bought two when I could get my hands on them, and have just added a third. My original Charmera I’m going to keep in its natural state, aside from covering the flash. The second I’m hoping to open up and remove the IR cut filter to make it truly full-spectrum. All being well that’ll be the subject of a future post. The third, still in its box, is hopefully to be used for a ‘thing’ that I have in mind that I’m not going to talk about yet in case it doesn’t happen.  

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#Abstract #Charmera #Experimental #Infrared #Kodak #KodakCharmera #LoFi #Retro #Shittycamerachallenge #ToyCamera #VintageVibes

Kodak Charmera - example photos with all the filter and frame options: https://andrewmelder.com/2025/12/24/kodak-charmera-example-photos-with.html

A photo comparison of the different filters and frames available with the Kodak Charmera toy camera.
#Photography #Kodak #KodakCharmera #ToyCamera

Some ‘serious’ photographers write off the Kodak Charmera as a fad & future e-waste. While that maybe true for some, treat it as the cheap, low stakes fun toy camera it is & you’ll have a great time.

#Photography #Kodak #KodakCharmera #ToyCamera #Dogs

I got myself and a good friend a Kodak Charmera each and I'm absolutely charmed with this little thing!
#KodakCharmera #ToyCamera

Kodak Charmera Review: Reto Makes a Retro Redo https://petapixel.com/2025/12/20/kodak-charmera-review-reto-makes-a-retro-redo/ #retokodakcharmera #christmasgift #compactcamera #pointandshoot #collectible #giftideas #toycamera #blindbox #gashapon #Reviews #ewaste #Kodak

SnapRoll is coming to Henry's Cameras. A tiny retro digital camera with film vibes that might just be the next Kodak Charmera. #SnapRoll #KodakCharmera #ToyCamera

READ MORE: https://www.gameops.net/2025/12/snaproll-is-coming-to-henrys-cameras.html

Got a G6 Thumb Camera as a birthday gift from @quira that looks a lot like the Kodak Charmera. It has similar image quality to the Charmera, but with more filters, more features, and wider 16:9 photos compared to the Charmera's 4:3, all without the hefty price tag. I kinda like the 4:3 aspect ratio of the Charmera, though.

If you're into toy cameras, check it out on GameOPS Deals:
https://deals.gameops.net/2025/12/g6-thumb-camera-knock-off-kodak-charmera.html

#KodakCharmera #G6ThumbCamera #toycamera

Camp Snap CS-Pro Review: Slightly More Tolerable https://petapixel.com/2025/12/11/camp-snap-cs-pro-review-slightly-more-tolerable/ #pointandshootphotography #outdoorphotography #streetphotography #travelphotography #flashphotography #plasticcameras #pocketcamera #campsnappro #teencamera #Equipment #giftideas #toycamera #campsnap #Reviews #ewaste

These Six Cute Cameras All Cost Under $60 and Just Seem Fun https://petapixel.com/2025/12/09/these-six-cute-cameras-all-cost-under-60-and-just-seem-fun/ #keychaincamera #cameraforkids #compactcamera #digitalcamera #pointandshoot #Equipment #toycamera #keychain #digicam #Analog #News #toy

Filling The Gaps: The ’72MP, 4K Ultra HD’ Digital Scamera

This always happens to me: I had this urge (again) to try some circuit bending. This involves getting a cheap digital camera, taking it apart and poking some wires into the connectors on the sensor, which if done right can produce some lovely glitchy images, but if done wrong can wreck the camera, so it has to be a device that you don’t mind possibly losing.

The second-hand electrical discount store CEX (Computer Exchange) is an excellent source for cheap digicams. In addition to specific models, quite often they offer ‘generic’ digital cameras for just a few Euros, and whenever one of these appears on the website I am tempted to get it. The thing is, you don’t know what you’re going to get. It might be a no-name brand camera fit for the bin, or sometimes an absolute classic, like the mint condition Canon Powershot G5 that arrived for just 3€. The point being, although I always intend to get one of these cameras for circuit bending I always end up ‘falling in love’ with it, and not having the nerve to potentially destroy it. 

Anyhow. Last weekend a 12MP ‘generic’ digital camera appeared on the CEX website for 10€.  Normally, I would be reluctant to pay so much for a digicam, but this time I wanted some decent resolution and this seemed to fit the bill. When the package arrived, it was quite heavy, and I wondered if it might be a decent camera again, like something from the Canon Powershot range. Instead it was something even better; a ’72MP 4K Ultra HD’ Chinese made scamera. 

I first noticed these appearing on reputable websites in Portugal like Worten and Fnac when I was looking for a decent resolution digital camera for myself a couple of years ago. At the time they were priced at well over 100€, although often as not were heavily discounted. It was obvious it was a scamera, though not as blatant as those 35mm ‘Cannon’ cameras that were around a while ago, cheap plastic fixed lens ‘SLRs’ with a lead weight in the bottom that made them heavier.

Advertised as a, ‘4K Digital Camera for Photography, 72MP Autofocus Vlogging Cameras for YouTube with 64GB SD Card and Battery, 18X Digital Zoom 2.8″ 270° Flip Screen Compact Travel Camera for Teens’, they would pop up in the ‘marketplace’ of these websites. When I can, I generally  avoid the marketplace, since they’re  often Chinese sites offloading tat at vastly inflated prices. And this was no different. It’s a terrible sounding description. That entry was from Amazon, where it’s on sale for $36, but I’m certainly not going to provide a link for it. No one deserves that. 

In the hand the ’72M MEGA PIXELS’ scamera feels ‘plasticky’ and looks nothing like a quality camera should look. The camera can be turned on just by flipping the back open or, if the LCD screen is revealed, with an on/off button on the top. Incidentally, the red circled button is not the power button, that’s to record video. The shutter button is the big button on the top front, with the ‘zoom’ toggle. That does nothing, apart from digitally zoom the image. The ‘welcome’ screen is the tackiest opening screen I’ve ever seen, and the switch off screen is the same (‘bye bye’). The scamera beeps and chirps with a cheap-sounding tune, and the shutter sound is hopelessly synthetic. 

The lens is amazing, and not in a good way. Described as, ‘5-axis stabilizer, 5K ultra HD, 3.95mm f1.8’, this lens looks like it’s a simple lens that projects straight onto a small sensor, like you’d get on a toy camera. Which I’m pretty sure it is. Although it says 5K on the lens, on the body the video resolution is described as 4K. I’ve not tested the video, or the sound quality, but I’m sure that it’s not either, at least not without a whole package of electronic jiggery-pokery. Which brings me to the claim of 72MP resolution.  Is it? I suspect not.

If you take a typical 72MP image, the file size is 9856×7,392, or 72,855,552 pixels. But when you zoom in to that image it’s full of artifacts, so there’s certainly something going on there. I took a full frame image at 72MP, and a second at the lowest resolution offered by the scamera of 8MP. I zoomed each image to roughly the same size, and compared them. At 8MP, the zoomed image is ‘sharp-ish’, with details in the plaster and glass pieces in the globe. It’s still full of ‘rubbish’, mind you. At 72MP, which from a true 72MP you would expect to be filled with detail, it’s a mess. I suspect there’s been a lot of ‘upsampling’ going on here, where the software in the scamera interpolates and creates new pixels based on existing ones. This adds more pixels to make a much larger image but does not add any further resolution. So by my rough reckoning, this is at best an 8MP sensor. Truly, a scamera.

I took the scamera out and about during a trip to Oiã on a lovely sunny day, and here are the results. The images here have been resized to 1366 pixels at the longest edge, so there’s no 72MP here (not that there ever was, anyhow). The colours came out quite delightfully, actually, and I really liked how it appeared. I was very confused with the one image of the water tower, mind. This was taken in daytime but it looks like night. I did actually try to check out the infrared response of the scamera, and there was a horrible ‘hot spot’ in the middle of the image, so this may well be light reflecting in the lens.

In conclusion, I finally got my hands on the 72MP digital scamera, a device I had been interested in learning about for a while. At 10€, it was still overpriced, and the scamera is truly a horrendous beast with absolutely zero appeal. Will I use it for circuit bending? Well, actually, although I was reluctant at first to do this, now I’m thinking that it might be a worthy contender. One of these days, I’m going to open it up, just to see what it’s like inside, and we’ll go from there.

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.

#cameraslscams #circuitbending #digicam #experimental #glitch #infrared #lofi2 #retro #scamera #toycamera #trashcam #upsampling

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