I mentioned the Camp Snap camera yesterday, a $69 plastic toy-like camera originally made for kids. They’ve sold a lot of them, and it has become a phenomenon. Many teenagers and older adults have started to use it instead of smartphones for a different look. The image quality is clearly worse than that of modern-day smartphones, but many don’t seem to care. With no back screen, it offers a simple, old-school film-like experience.

I was curious whether I could use them to make decent-quality pictures, and that was part of the fun and the challenge.

There are many limitations with the camera, of course. The pictures it takes are too overprocessed and, ironically, look too digital, even though the screen-free interface gives the feeling of old one-time-use film cameras. The small 1/3.2″ sensor doesn’t have much dynamic range, so it’s easy to blow out highlights. And since there are no exposure adjustments you can make on camera, you’ve got to live with blown-out highlights. But the biggest limitation is that the shutter speed quickly drops to 1/17s, which results in many blurry photos. It makes street photography in marginal light very challenging.

This picture turned out decently, except for the motion blur of the guy on the other side of the woman on the left.

To combat the over-processed digital look, I’ve figured out a way to post-process the JPEGs to create a more filmic look. I’ll talk more about this in the next post.

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