Thoughts on the tiny camera market (and Kodak Charmera specifically)

[kye]

I got a Kodak Charmera keychain camera recently.  It's terrible and you shouldn't buy one, but it is interesting.

In case you don't know, keychain cameras are seriously tiny cameras (think smaller than a GoPro) and have gone viral in the last year or so.  The Kodak Charmera is probably the most viral one, with multiple production runs being sold out very quickly and reissues etc.  Here's mine in comparison to some other cameras, including a couple of GoPro-sized action cameras and some actually pocketable cameras (GF3 and GX85).

Why is the Charmera interesting?  I think the design is essentially perfect:

• It's incredibly small (obviously) and ridiculously light but it's actually quite tough
• It's got a 35mm equivalent FOV lens
• It charges from USB-C
• With almost any MicroSD card it has practically infinite storage
• It has a rear screen that is just large enough to navigate the (very simple) menu and frame shots
• It's super-simple to use, if you plug it into a computer it turns on, mounts as a USB drive (without needing any software), charges the battery while connected, then when you unplug it it turns off again
• It's a ~15Mbps motion JPEG codec
• It's USD $30

Why aren't I recommending it?

• The image quality is terrible.  TERRIBLE.
• It says it has a 1440x1080 sensor, and that's the resolution of the JPGs and video files, but I think it's 2x2 binned, and heavily sharpened too, so it's a very poor quality VGA camera.  I shot a resolution chart - the moire was practically psychedelic.
• JPGs are just as bad as the video files
• No control over anything and with its AE it's perfectly happy to clip the crap out of decent chunks of the image

Why am I even bothering to write about it then?

It's a new class of camera.

We haven't really had cameras that were smaller than action cameras before, but not only have we got them now, but they sold out multiple times, so the world (or at least the trendy impulse buying world) has solidly suggested there is demand for them.

As far as I can tell, the competitors are action cameras, or those that are smaller like the Insta360 Go, and that's about it.  Those are 10x the price though, and larger and not nearly as fun to use.  The image quality of them is vastly superior, but in todays market where I wish I could get a camera that was smaller, had a quarter (or sixteenth) the resolution, and was drastically cheaper, this is the kind of thing that didn't used to exist really.

Even just playing with it around the house, I film things I wouldn't normally film.  It feels different to use.  

This is a new product in the market that smartphones basically killed.

Everyone used to have small point-n-shoot cameras but they all got killed by smartphones - the industry essentially got eaten from the bottom up.  This is the first counter-example I'm aware of (other than action cameras).  I would venture that everyone who bought one already had a smartphone, so this fulfils a niche that their expensive fragile dopamine-addicting smartphone doesn't.  

Retro cameras have enjoyed a resurgence recently, but I would suggest that this is different as it's a new thing rather than an old thing limping along.  This might make executives take note - it's not that small cameras are dying slower than they think - there is active demand and innovation in this space.

Tech gets better.

Assuming this form-factor remains popular, the video quality will get better.  I don't know why it wouldn't remain around..  kids aren't likely to want to record themselves less in future, tiny things won't stop being cute, having something so small it takes up zero space in your pocket (it's a keychain camera!) won't stop being handy, etc.

What I'd really like to see is a 'pro' version of this camera..  one that takes real 1080p video and doesn't sharpen it like it's entering a butchering competition.  Same size (or a little larger), same simple design, could be more expensive and still be interesting.

[Clark Nikolai]

3 hours ago, kye said:

What I'd really like to see is a 'pro' version of this camera..  one that takes real 1080p video and doesn't sharpen it like it's entering a butchering competition. 

Me too. I see them and they look fun but the picture examples are so bad. The sharpening is the worst part of it (but likely to make up for the low quality lens.) Being the age I am, I don't get any nostalgia for the look of early digital cameras. I want a better image (even if it's small by today's standards.) It doesn't have to be raw but a higher bitrate JPEG would be great. The option to save two files, one raw (or log high bitrate JPEG) and a JPEG with an in camera filter applied would be good. Unlike the days of early digital cameras, there's no need to save storage space anymore.

I once had a little spy pen camera, no viewfinder, only 1 megapixel. It only held 12 pictures but they were pretty good quality considering the size. It was fun because you just pointed in the general direction and clicked. Only later when you got home you found out what you got. Not a design thing, just the limitations of the time. I got it for ten bucks or something and it was totally worth it for a bit of fun a few times. It sat in a drawer for twenty years and now doesn't hold a charge. It's not worth it for me to replace the battery.

 

[mercer]

Some kid will use that camera and make a short film and upload it to YT, then he'll get a Hollywood deal.

A couple will buy 30 of them and put then on the wedding guest's tables for people to snap photos and take some video. The groom will edit them all together on his phone while sitting on the beach during his honeymoon. He will also upload it to YT and probably get a Hollywood deal. lol. 

[kye]

10 hours ago, Clark Nikolai said:

Me too. I see them and they look fun but the picture examples are so bad. The sharpening is the worst part of it (but likely to make up for the low quality lens.) Being the age I am, I don't get any nostalgia for the look of early digital cameras. I want a better image (even if it's small by today's standards.) It doesn't have to be raw but a higher bitrate JPEG would be great. The option to save two files, one raw (or log high bitrate JPEG) and a JPEG with an in camera filter applied would be good. Unlike the days of early digital cameras, there's no need to save storage space anymore.

The example pictures online are actually cherry-picked.  The images I'm seeing from mine are worse, to the extent I wondered if I got a fake.  When I looked closer I just think they chose the nicest ones, which is really just how social media works!

You'd be forgiven for thinking it's the lens, but it's really not.  Here is a sample image so you can see what I'm seeing.

Charmera - 1440x1080 - SOOC - 280K file size:

For reference, here's a 1440x1080 280K image from my GX85 with matched FOV:

The level of detail is incomparable.

What happens if I take the GX85 image and 2x downscale it to 720px then upscale it to 1440 280K again?

It's a lot closer, and obviously I haven't sharpened the crap out of it (just doing this quickly in Preview on Mac).

But what happens if I take a 3x downsample 480px, then upscale to 1440 280K again?

This is definitely lower resolution (the artefacts from the lower res are larger compared to the Charmera).

Charmera crop:

GX85 -> 3x downsample -> 1440px:

GX85 -> 2x downsample -> 1440px:

That's much closer.

What does all this mean?  The limitation is the processor.

I believe that they're using a 1440x1080 processor (as they claim) but they're using it in a 720x576 20p readout mode, then sharpening the crap out of it, then upscaling it to 1440x1080, converting it from 20p to 30p, then compressing it to ~15Mbps.

The colour isn't that great either, this may be a processing thing too, I'm not sure.

The issue is that for them to use the sensor in a 1440 readout mode would require 4x the data rates, which is 4x the processing.  If you want the file in real 30p instead of 20p padded out to 30p, that's another 50% again, so 6x the processing.  As we know from compact cameras that try and be 4K or 6K and also small, that's overheating territory.  It's also "batteries only last how long?!?!?!?!?!" territory.

So it would need to be 6x more powerful.  I'm not really sure how much extra space those things would require, although GoPro can now do 8K30, which is 16x the data rates of a 2K30 camera, plus its doing all kinds of stabilisation processing etc on top of that, so I'd imagine there is room for these things in such a device if someone was to make one.

Someone said that this circuit is likely a very common circuit in all kinds of cameras like dash cams etc, so it's probably only through economies of scale that this can be done.  There were quite a number of action cameras and other common cameras that had a real 1080p30 readout, so maybe the pro version could leverage one of those existing architectures of existing chips.  That would be pretty awesome!

[kye]

1 hour ago, mercer said:

A couple will buy 30 of them and put then on the wedding guest's tables for people to snap photos and take some video.

I've heard that this is quite common, although from larger cameras with more camera-like shapes.  I wonder how many people have done this...

[Emanuel]

20 hours ago, kye said:

I got a Kodak Charmera keychain camera recently.  It's terrible and you shouldn't buy one, but it is interesting.

(...)

Love the way you put it! : ) As everyone of your posts BTW < 3 Thanks, always a pleasure reading you : ) Great-juicy-post BTW part II ;- )

[Emanuel]

7 hours ago, mercer said:

A couple will buy 30 of them and put then on the wedding guest's tables for people to snap photos and take some video. 

A couple of my cousins did this a couple of decades ago : ) with Kodak disposable 35mm film cameras.

No photographer, no wedding videographer at all ;- )

[newfoundmass]

If it had a decent camera I'd actually be interested. But the ones I've seen will all end up as e-waste eventually.

If it took photos (I don't really care if it takes video) that looked good on social media I'd be very interested though.