is a senior reporter who’s been covering and reviewing the latest gadgets and tech since 2006, but has loved all things electronic since he was a kid.
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Everything from smartphones to handheld consoles now come in a variety of different colors, but what if you didn’t get to pick your favorite? That’s how the new Kodak Charmera is being sold. It’s a tiny digital camera released in seven different retro styles and colors but in blind box packaging so you don’t know which one you’re actually getting. You can roll the dice and buy one for $29.99, or guarantee you’re getting the color you want by buying the whole set for $179.94.
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1 / 2 The Charmera includes both an optical viewfinder and an LCD screen on the back. Image: Kodak
Created as part of a collaboration with Reto, the Charmera is a modern recreation of the Kodak Fling disposable film camera first released in 1987. The new version is fully digital, but you won’t want to rely on it as your primary shooter. Weighing 30 grams and measuring just over 2.2 inches in size the Charmera has a paltry 1.6-megapixel sensor with a plastic lens it uses to shoot stills or HD videos which are stored on a microSD card.
A selection of filters can help hide the Charmera’s technical limitations. Image: Kodak
Image and video quality aren’t going to be stellar – PetaPixel tested it and shared photos they took – but you can mask the Charmera’s limitations using optional photo frame effects and filters, including red, yellow, blue, and gray filters that appear to mask oversharpened details entirely.