Kodak Charmera Review: A Cute Keychain Camera That’s Beyond Retro

The Kodak Charmera is a camera for your keychain. Smaller than a roll of film, the thumb-sized camera can take photos and videos. Given the low $35 price and tiny size, performance is, to put it kindly, modest. 

The camera is adorable, though, and comes in several different designs with varying levels of retro-ness. Not that you get to choose: The Charmera is sold as a blind box, like a collectible toy. And as a gift or fun toy, the Charmera has a great design and is an even better conversation starter. If people see you using it, they will be curious. As a camera, though, it’s… something.

Specs and hardware

• Photo resolution: 1.6 megapixels (1,449×1,080 pixels)
• Video resolution: 1,440×1,080, 30fps
• Sensor size: 1/4-inch
• Lens: 35mm, f2.4
• Image stabilization: LOL, no
• Screen size: 0.96-inch
• Storage: microSD
• Weight: 30 grams (1.1 ounces)

The Charmera is technically a camera. Not a good one, mind you, but it does capture images. Shockingly, for its size and price, it can even record video. It does both of these things about as well as I can run a half-marathon, which is to say, not well, and the result isn’t pretty. 

Having both microSD storage and USB-C, it’s actually better equipped than some budget cameras I’ve reviewed. There’s no Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. To get the images off the Charmera, you either need a card reader or a USB-C cable to connect directly to your phone. Sometimes this even works. Apparently, really large-capacity microSD cards confuse the phone, Charmera or both. Given the size of the images and the camera’s capabilities, you don’t need a card with much storage or speedy performance.

Like nearly all modern Kodak products, the Charmera isn’t actually made by Kodak; the manufacturer merely licenses the name. The actual company is the Hong Kong-based RETO Production, which makes a variety of retro-themed cameras. The most brilliant part of its design for the Charmera is a combination of blind boxes and what I have to assume is manufactured scarcity. To the second point, maybe it really is selling more than it can make. It’s been constantly sold out, with people unable to buy them anywhere, despite, or because of, growing hype (for my part, guilty, I guess). It’s definitely one way to drive up demand. People want what they can’t have. 

This scarcity aspect is combined with blind boxes. There are seven different camera designs. All are good, but some are better than others. However, the box looks the same, so you can’t tell what you’re getting until you open it. It adds a bit of excitement and potential disappointment to the purchase, and for some people, I’m sure it also means they buy more than one. It’s clever marketing, to be honest, and it seems to be working.

The Charmera’s tiny 1/4-inch image sensor might solve the mystery of where recycled electronics go because it seems transported through time, direct from leftover ’90s gear, but more on that in a moment. To give you an idea of how small that is, the “small” camera sensors in something like the inexpensive Kodak FZ55 are 1/2.3-inch type, which equates to the chip having a physical size of 7.7mm diagonally. The Charmera’s sensor is 4.5mm diagonal, or 1/8 of an inch. This would make the nail on your pinkie finger look enormous in comparison.

That’s about as small an image sensor as you can get, so it’s not going to capture a lot of light even if it had an amazing lens, which it doesn’t. The lens, also tiny and I assume plastic, has a stated focal length of 35mm (35mm equivalent), but in my testing, it seemed closer to 50mm, which is a narrower field of view than the main camera on most phones.

Usability and photo quality

The Charmera has the worst image quality of any camera I’ve ever used in my life. This includes ’90s-era digital cameras. I didn’t think it was possible for any modern image sensor to take photos this bad. They look like 8 pixels drunk on Everclear trying to assemble a recognizable shape. They look like they were finger-painted by an impressively untalented infant. They’re digital images as rendered by an impressionist painter who thinks Monet is pronounced “Mon-ett.” (I’m gonna keep going, and you can’t stop me.)

You’d have a better idea what I was photographing if I described it to you in a language you don’t know. I think after the Charmera was designed, all the marketing finished, the product shipping in the morning, one of the designers bolted upright in bed at 3 a.m., wiping cold, panicked sweat from their brow, exclaiming, “Oh, crap! It needs to actually take photos!” and then went right back to sleep figuring they’d deal with it in the morning.

So after all that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln? Actually, this thing is pretty adorable. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a terrible camera. Not sure how you could “get me wrong” after the previous paragraphs, but here’s the thing: As a conversation starter, as an amusing toy, the Charmera is great. I haven’t had one for very long, but my friend has had one for several months, and she’s asked about it all the time. It looks awesome. 

For such a tiny budget camera, there are a surprising number of buttons (maybe that’s where the budget went?). On top is the shutter and a power button that also activates a menu. On the back, next to the tiny screen, are navigation buttons, as well as one that enters the playback mode.

There are no settings to speak of, other than including a date stamp on either photos or videos. There are a bunch of different filters, ranging from overly warm and overly cool styles, plus black and white and a few others. More interesting are frames to lay over your image. One of these looks like something straight out of MS Paint from Windows 3.1, which tells me the designers of this camera either knew exactly what they were designing or at least had a sense of humor. 

The tiny screen works well enough to line up your shots. If that’s too useful for you, there’s an even tinier lensless viewfinder, literally just a square hole in the body, in case you want to draw even more attention to yourself and/or look cool in someone else’s photo taken with a better camera. In the Charmera’s opposite corner, there’s a small LED “flash” that at distances of more than a few feet is little better than the suggestion of light.

The video is also bad, no surprise there, but it looks less like something is wrong and more like a mediocre camera from the mid-2000s. Think early YouTube. It’s 1,440×1,080, so technically HD, but like the photos, it’s soft and undersaturated. It also saves to an .avi file format that phones might not read. My assumption is that the image sensor is capturing 640×480 photos and videos (maybe less) and upconverting them to 1,440×1,080. Not that it matters. I just think these look way worse than anything remotely close to 1080p.

Charmed

Look, the Charmera is fun, and it’s $35. I’m not going to talk anyone out of some harmless fun for $35. As a camera, no, this is terrible, even by the standards of cheap digital cameras. As a toy, a bauble, a charm (oooh, I bet that’s where the name comes from), it’s super cute.

Can you use the images on social media? Yeah, I guess, you can see the images above and decide if that matches your Insta aesthetic. They’re beyond what I’d call “retro” unless, that is, you’re trying to mimic the image quality of the world’s worst webcam. If you are, the Charmera nails it.