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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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.
Even the Charmera’s bright yellow retro-insipred packaging is hard to resist.
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.
On top of the Charmera you’ll find power and shutter buttons. The camera’s screen is less than an inch in size, and an even smaller portion of that is used to provide a live preview of what you’re snapping. The menu and settings are easy to navigate but with little to no customization aside from choosing to display the date on photos. You can’t disable the camera’s automatic flash, but it has the fun side benefit of illuminating the interior of the transparent Charmera.
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.
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