GoKawiilis 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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Despite being an objectively terrible digital camera, the Kodak Charmera has been incredibly popular thanks to a cheap price tag and several fun retro designs inspired by the iconic 1987 single-use Kodak Fling. Instead of entirely rethinking that formula, Reto, the company licensing the Kodak brand, is following up on the original Charmera with a Millennium Edition. The seven shiny new designs draw inspiration from the tech and aesthetics of the early 2000s, and at $34.99 each, these will probably once again fly off camera store shelves.
The Charmera Millennium Edition cameras all feature a glossy metallic finish in various colors and designs. Image: Reto
The Charmera Millennium Edition isn’t just about a Y2K facelift. Reto has updated its software with a total of seven photo filters and four new frames that can be applied to images as they’re snapped. While the original Charmera had a black-and-white mode as well as four high-contrast color “pixel” filters, the Millennium Edition expands those filters with four new options including coral, honey, teal, and violet.
The new Charmera gets a few new filter options that help hide the limitations of its small sensor. Image: Reto
Inside the new version of the camera, you’ll find the same hardware as the original, which is disappointing. It still uses a 1.6-megapixel ¼-inch sensor that captures photos at a resolution of just 1,440x1,080 pixels, while videos recorded as AVI files max out at 30fps. That allows you to store thousands of snaps on a microSD card up to 128GB in size, but even in the year 2000, point-and-shoot cameras from companies like Canon and Sony had sensors capturing more than 2-megapixels. Reto isn’t positioning the Charmera as anything other than a photography toy, but moving forward, it will need more than cosmetic refreshes to keep it interesting.