This little camera comes with an inspired name and clever blind box packaging – but is there any substance?
Amateur Photographer verdict
The Kodak Charmera is rather fun, at least for the first few minutes after you open up the blind box. Sadly it’s all downhill from there, with image quality that’s awful even for the lowly price.
- Cute design
- Cheap
- Dreadful image quality
- Obtuse operation
- Terrible screen
The Kodak Charmera is a cheap, thumb-sized camera which has somehow managed to acquire a cult following online. At least in part, this can be attributed to the inspired portmanteau of ‘Charm’ and ‘Camera’ that forms its name. But it’s also reinforced by a ‘blind box’ sales approach, where you don’t know which of the seven available designs you’ve got until you open the box. But even taking into account its low price, it’s never going to trouble any of our lists of the best cameras you can buy.
Kodak Charmera at a glance:
- $35 / £35
- 1/4in CMOS sensor, 1.6MP output
- 35mm equivalent f/2.4 lens
- MicroSD card storage
- 58 x 24.5 x 20mm, 30g
- kodak.com
That ‘blind box’ approach means that when you open the box, you have an equal chance of finding any of the six main designs: yellow, black, white, grey, red, blue and white. There’s also 1-in-48 chance of getting the ‘secret edition’, with a see-through shell. Some people might want to seek out a particular variant; others might even want to collect them all. You can even buy a carton of six cameras, which is guaranteed to include six different designs.
Design-wise, the Charmera is inspired by the Kodak Fling 110 film single-use camera from 1987, with the same wide oblong shape. This is particularly the case with the fabulous-looking yellow version that’s shown in all the marketing, and which references classic 1980s Kodak Gold film packaging.
The other designs don’t have such an obvious connection to Kodak, but they remind me of the colourful envelopes that your prints and negatives used to come back in. I ended up with the black variant, which naturally, I’ve managed to convince myself is the second-best.
Kodak Charmera key features:
- Photo Filters: The camera offers 7 photo filters and 4 frames, selected using the buttons on the back
- USB-C port: This is used to top up the built-in rechargeable battery and copy files from the camera to a computer or smartphone
- Storage: Files are recorded to a MicroSD card that slots into the base of the camera
- Accessories: You get USB charge cable in the box, plus a keychain with a metal clip
Unsurprisingly given the size and price, this is a very basic camera. It has a tiny 1/4in sensor and outputs 1.6MP images with just 1440 x 1080 px resolution. There’s a minuscule, low-resolution screen on the back that gives only the vaguest sense of what the camera is looking at, plus a tiny ‘viewfinder’ in one corner, although really it’s just a hole through the body that shows a much narrower view than the lens will capture.
You also get an LED ‘flash’ on the front that auto-activates in low light, but it’s far too small and puny to be of much use.
Likewise, controls are pretty minimal. There’s a power button next to the shutter release, and three small buttons on the back to select options and play back your images.
Operational ‘logic’ is decidedly obtuse; for example, you can’t take a photo immediately after turning on the camera, but instead have to select stills or video mode on the welcome screen first, and then press ‘play’ to start shooting. Deleting an image or changing settings requires multiple button presses and plenty of guesswork.
There’s only really one word to describe the image quality, though, and that’s ‘awful’. I don’t think I’ve ever seen any digicam return results this bad before, with ugly clipped highlights and barely any visible detail. You get least-bad results at the distances you’d use for social photography (around 1-2m), but distant subjects look like they’re completely out of focus.
Other cheap toy cameras, such as the charming TLR-styled Chuzhao, deliver much better quality, not least because they include autofocus. Likewise any smartphone will give much, much better results.
As well as taking standard photos, the camera offers 7 photo filters and 4 frames, selected using the up and down key on the back. Some are just terrible, but others are actually quite fun. Sadly they’re not available for video.
Kodak Charmera: Our Verdict
On the plus side, the Charmera is cheap, and the design is really rather cute. Unfortunately, though, its novelty value is negated by its terrible image quality. I wasn’t expecting it to be good – but I didn’t imagine it would be quite so bad.
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