Choosing bad video quality

[kye]

There's a counter-culture online of (young) people shooting with early digicams etc, and the way they talk about it is that they're going for an alternative aesthetic to the clean modern digital look that's now in every smartphone and has become the 'default' look.

Personally, I've been pushing how small a video camera can be, and it has brought me to the same place - deliberately choosing very poor video quality.  

I've been using the Kodak Charmera for travel, which is the size of a construction-workers thumb, because it's so small no-one really takes it seriously when shooting in public, and also because it doesn't attract thieves etc (unlike a large ILC or new smartphone).  But I'm also resurrecting my old Lumix point-n-shoot for roughly the same reasons.

I've started to think of the Charmera as a sort-of modern Super-8 camera - a much smaller and lower quality camera for amateurs.  If you apply some film emulation then it can take away some(!) of the digital nasties but I'm guessing some people will prefer the unmodified low-quality digital look.  In a sense it's a 'worst of both worlds' situation as it clips like digital but also has the low resolution of film while simultaneously looking sharp and harsh - applying the film emulation rectifies some of these issues to create a hybrid with some limitations of both looks.

Here are some stills, both ungraded and also graded with a modified version of my Super16 film emulation, and some sample footage to get a sense of the motion (it's truly terrible).  However, the more I use this camera and look at the footage the more it grows on me.  I can't say I like it, but as I get used to the look it strikes me more as a look rather than deficiency.

Here's a warts-n-all montage of some shots I took.  I was mostly walking around while rolling, but at 45mm FOV with no stabilisation it's pretty jittery anyway considering it weighs about 30g / 1oz so has almost no weight to prevent micro-jitters.  If this was a real edit I'd smooth over a lot of the rough edges like sound pops and clicks etc, but this is a realistic look at how it performs.  The issues do lend it a certain charm (like in the name!) I think, and it's the imperfections that give something character, so logically this must have a lot of it!

I'm still constantly thinking about how to get better results from it, but being so small it's hard to modify the setup at all without drastically diluting its biggest advantage - the size.

Anyone else experimenting in the very shallow end of image quality?

[MrSMW]

Super cool.

The only thing that I don’t like is the lack of stability, so I guess I like ‘the look’ more than anything.

I’d never use any ‘retro’ camera myself, but I like the concept and idea of it.

Keep pushing Kye!