Like trading cards, Lego figures, and even the coveted Labubu, you don’t know exactly what your Kodak Charmera camera is going to look like until you open the box. The anticipation and a $30 price tag helped the collectible camera sell out quickly and become nearly impossible to find over the holidays after its debut last September. The Charmera’s not going to replace your smartphone camera, or even a decade-old point-and-shoot buried in a drawer. But it’s got enough charm to earn it a place on your keyring, and enough novelty to occasionally use it to snap a lo-fi memory or two.
The Charmera comes in six retro designs, plus a rarer “secret edition” with a transparent shell. I was hoping for the bright yellow version designed to look like the single-use Kodak Fling camera that inspired the Charmera, but I was certainly not disappointed to find the transparent one.
I’m not immune to the excitement of opening a so-called blind box collectible, but more satisfying than finding the rare transparent version was discovering how small the camera really is. Although I’ve seen the Charmera all over social media for the past few months, I was expecting something closer in size to a disposable film camera, and not something comparable to a Chapstick. Even my family oohed and aahed when I explained the tiny plastic box attached to my keys was a functional digital camera.
That functionality, however, is extremely limited. There are five small buttons on the Charmera, but just one, the shutter release, is used for taking pictures. It’s a completely automatic camera with no way to adjust exposure, focus, white balance, or any other settings. It’s as point-and-shoot as a camera gets.
There’s a built-in LED flash that automatically turns on when the camera thinks the scene is too dark, but its effective range is limited to just a few feet, and you can’t disable it. In the transparent version of the Charmera, the LED illuminates the entire camera from within, which is a fun effect.
The Charmera has built-in storage, but the amount is laughable. You can snap just two photos before the camera starts flashing a “disk full” warning, so you’ll want to factor in the added price of a microSD card. I found an old 4GB card in a drawer, which boosted the camera’s picture capacity to just over 14,000 shots.
The camera can squeeze so many images on a relatively tiny microSD card because it uses a small 1.6-megapixel ¼-inch sensor that captures photos just 1,440×1,080 pixels in size. That’s paired with a 35mm f/2.4 plastic lens that works together to produce images that are typically disappointing. Photos are soft, grainy, and noisy, with colors that look incredibly desaturated. There’s little to no dynamic range, resulting in blown-out highlights and shadows that lack detail. If you’re shooting with limited lighting, you’ll also need to hold the Charmera rocksteady to avoid blur from a longer exposure — something that’s quite difficult to do with a camera that weighs only 30 grams.
The Charmera includes a collection of color modes, filters, and decorative frames that can be added to photos while you’re taking them. Skip the frames, since they all feel like promotional tools for the Charmera and the Kodak brand, but some of the filters are worth trying. There’s a black-and-white mode that’s occasionally fun, plus high-contrast red, blue, yellow, and gray “pixel” filters that create high-contrast two-tone images that are sometimes more interesting than what the camera typically captures.
Videos, captured as AVI files, are even more of a letdown, plagued with compression artifacts and lots of jerky movements if you’re moving the camera around. The captured audio is equally bad, and if you attach the included metal keychain and don’t secure it while recording, most of what you’ll hear in videos will be its jangling.
Framing shots is also a disappointing challenge. The Charmera’s equally tiny LCD screen is less than an inch in size, and only a smaller portion of it is used to present a live preview. You may find yourself squinting as you frame a shot or navigate the camera’s rudimentary menu system, which includes options to set the time and date, format the memory card, or delete images. There is an even smaller optical viewfinder, but it’s nothing more than a hole that goes right through the camera, and is even less effective.
I’m not surprised by the Charmera’s lack of camera controls, its terrible photo and video quality, its limited battery life, or its tiny screen. What surprised me is how little I cared about it being bad at all those things. It’s a charming little electronic tchotchke that I found myself pulling out of my pocket more frequently than I expected to. Like the Charmera itself, taking photos is its own blind box experience. Most of the time, you end up with photos you’ll probably want to delete, but occasionally you’ll get a snap that’s fun or unique and worth sharing. As the name implies, the Charmera’s charm is its real appeal.
Photos by Andrew Liszewski / The Verge