No matter how bad it is, the sole fact that you can have a full fledged camera that has a speaker, rechargable battery AND plays games/music for $7 is absolutely insane
Absolutely. In 1999, you could buy a basic digital camera called JamCam that shot VGA only, could only hold a handful of shots, and cost $99. 24 years later, you can buy a vastly superior and more capable digital camera for kids for $7.
If that surprises you, I bought a 6$ "smartwatch" off ebay and it actually came, it was brand new, had two batteries (that lasted, oh some minutes), and the thing had a vga camera, sim card reader (yes it's even a phone, and that actually worked). And that was like 5-6 years ago.
In china 7usd is worth a lot more then it is in the usa and also the chinese government subsidizes shipping costs that is why its free that's why item from china are so cheap
It definitely hits that 2004 era phone camera. It also seems like it's taking photos in a 4:3 aspect ratio and then stretching them to 16:9, which is weird because the video recording seems to be actually widescreen. Such a weird little device.
My daughter has this camera. I will also add that, as you fill up the SD card, the image capture speed gets slower and slower. My daughter has taken thousands of photos, and it now has a 3 second delay from pressing the shutter button to actual image capture.
I bet if you checked out the firmware whatever poor CPU is in it has to read the entire contents of the SD card to figure out what to make the filename.
I'd guess has to store the images to the SD before it can show you the result. And because of the way flash memory works, once it's gotten sort if full the card's controller may have shuffle some data around so it can erase enough blocks to have space.
Yeah. Bought one of these a year or two ago for our daughter when she went to camp. I was totally ok if she broke it ir lost it as she is terrible with taking care of her stuff, somehow she still has it, and it still works.
Back in the day, (~2000 or so) i had a little "Intel Pocket PC Camera"... a webcam that could be disconnected from your pc, and it had battery and some memory for about 60 640x480 images that were HIGHLY jpeg compressed, and SUPER saturated. No controls or display on it. It took wonderfully horrible pictures. :D
It actually looks like vhs which is a great thing nowadays. I saw this camera being sold in my local area supermarket in Poland and if this is the same model I’d love to grab one myself
My kids have two of these cameras. The empty “viewfinder” space is actually for a selfie camera! Some models have two camera modules, one for each direction. Keeps little kids entertained for hours
That's a 24-pin camera module, and they come in a variety of spec levels and with a ton of different lens options, including things like C-mount. Perhaps a follow up video testing it out with an assortment of cheap lenses from Aliexpress?
I think this is the same camera my mom bought my daughter for Christmas (she has early dementia, and did really think about the fact that it was 2022 and my daughter has an iPhone 8 and iPad Air 5). I think I spent 30 mins playing with it, and my kid played with it for maybe 5 mins lol. It’s really funny, and did remind me of a camera from the 90s / early 2000s.
That 8-pin chip near the SoC looks like it's probably the ROM, and I would bet it's most likely an SPI ROM chip. That means you can dump it and find out a bit more about how it works, or even write a custom firmware.
There's a whole photographic concept based around bad cameras like this called lomography, it's pretty fun! There's also a Lomography company that makes intentionally bad or just weird films that can be pretty sweet (and they're also basically the only place that remembers 110 film exists these days).
My younger sister has Chinese camera with similar UI design overall. So I’m pretty sure it’s running similar firmware to this. And here’s some interesting things I found(which may or may not apply to this exact camera): - If you insert unformatted SD card, it will format it *without asking*. - If you plug in USB cable without SD card attached, it acts as crappy USB camera. - I tried filling SD card with random bytes, and startup/shutdown image was corrupted sometimes. Nice programming :D - Startup/shutdown image is user-replaceable.
I have to imagine that you would LOVE the PXL2000 if you ever got your hands on one. (It's a toy video camera from the 1980s that uses compact cassette, and is (in)famous for its weird image quality.)
My friend had one when I was a kid. We made slasher video's with it. I remember making a straw dummy and throwing him out my bedroom window in one video.
I just got one of those and mine has a Spreadrum SC6531F chip, which is apparently a low-end smartphone processor. Right now I'm doing a mod to add a focus adjustment option to the camera (aka I drilled a channel on the plastic housing for the camera module, and added a rigid wire wound around and glued to the lens, so I have an "arm" to control the focus with).
Mine arrived today and it is glorious. AR completely glosssed over the frames and filters! I am super excited to see if someone can't get the firmware and modify it...
To me its funny how so many folks are mentioning their old flip phone camera's. For me, this video makes me think back to our families first digital camera, a OG Apple Quicktake 100 we got new in late 94. I still have many fond memories of that old camera
That was actually quite a revolutionary camera, being well under $1000 and color. The Computer Chronicles did an episode on digital cameras in '93 and a QVGA black and white camera was about $800 (it did have a built in printer though). 90s tech, am I right.
This looks like a great gift for a child. My toddler still throws things around, so maybe in a couple years they’ll have one with better specs 😅 (hopefully, but probably not).
I'm a sucker for old camera tech. Always on the lookout at second hand shops. The find this week was a Panasonic Lumix dmc-fs15 for 5 bucks. Compact, still works great and battery holds a good charge. Sometimes I forget my phone is a camera, but when I have a point and shoot camera with me, I tend to take more photos of fun random things.
I found a 2002 cybershot pocket camera, with 64mb memory stick at a yard sale for $1 6 years ago. It was my main camera the rest of my teenage years, and it still works, but the plastic lens is foggy now, and cleaning it doesn't help, pictures are still decent though.
Had just been looking for this kind of low quality ultra compressed garbo for a while. Its nice that its quite modern and eliminates a ton of the quirks from actual turn of the millenium cameras
I still use a Lumix LC1 and L1 a lot, the former being a fixed lens 5mp CCD camera with an amazing lens and build quality, and the latter being a Four Thirds ILC at around 7mp with a live-mos sensor. You have to really understand proper lighting, but if you shoot properly they still put out some great images considering the age of the tech.
Wow, this is reminiscent of the worst digital camera I ever owned, which was a DXG-308 purchased in 2004 or 2005. I actually got it bundled with an Epson inkjet printer. I don't know if I paid $75 for the printer and got a free camera, or if I paid $75 for the camera and got a free printer. At the time, either by itself normally cost more than that. The printer was actually pretty good; it printed well and lasted for about 5 years. The camera, on the other hand, was awful. It ate batteries for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and that was even before you turned it on. The feature set and controls looked pretty good, but the CCD and optics were so bad that the only way it could take pictures in anything approaching true color was outside on bright, sunny days, and nothing was focused all that well. My daughter used it to take a picture of a historic building, and the tower on the building came out bent 90 degrees to the left and then another 90 degrees back up. I mean, it was an interesting-looking building, but not quite THAT interesting in real life.
I have been thinking the Raspberry Pi Foundation should make a kids camera. They make all the hardware. People could use it as a webcam, machine learning platform. Put Joycon rails on the side and people can play games on it.
Back when I bought my first $400 2MP camera at Comp USA, I never envisioned a camera could be $7. :) Time flies... Was it wrong that I kept hearing Wayne's World "extreme closeup!" when you were recording your cats? :P Nostalgia's great, isn't it?
@@arlandi I was initially thinking about it when he talked about how good the screen was. The camera would still be crappy likely. But a good mini screen for that cheap could be a good find
I remember having a camera in the late 90s that took pics like that. No video or games though and it lost its memory if it got switched off or the (really odd and hard to find) non rechargeable battery ran out. Lost loads of photos by accidently switching the thing off before uploading them to pc via a horribly slow usb1 connection to a really basic proprietary photo importer thingy.
I checked taobao (Aliexpress), $7 for standard version, $9.9 for "HD" version and $12.9for 9.6M version. Three years warranty. And you can add a very cute silicone case. For 3+ kids.
I do not think the videos or pictures are that bad and I love your sweet & cute kitties. I may have to buy one of these and see how they do just for fun.
I am actually impressed by this as it costs less than 10 bucks. As a kid I would have died for this and mom might actually have been able to get me this camera because it is so low priced.
similar thougths. As a camera to take videos outdoors, starting video editing - that thing would work. Sure, it is seriously limited, but this leads to a certain aesthetics and artistic limitations.
My daughters both got the “upgraded” model and I can confirm that is hole is not for a viewfinder but is in fact a hole for a front facing camera… or rear depending on what your definition of front is for a camera.
I remember spending many hundreds of pounds on a Casio QV-10 digital camera in 94 or 95, can't quite remember. The quality of its pictures was about on par with this! maybe a little better from memory but that might be the years... I remember it took 320x240 images, was extremely slow and generally terrible to use with glacial serial cable uploads of the exciting terrible pictures I took to my Windows 3.1 PC.
I have an Orion DigiSnap DS21 from 1994 but made in 1996 and sold in 1999 and from the looks of it never really used. It takes 320x240 images too, compresses them into jpeg (which was still called JIFF back then) at ca. 10% quality so the only purpose your photos have is to teach computer science students how JPEG compression works. You can barely make out what you shot. The image quality of this camera is abysmal, it's about as good as I imagine 100 line mechanical TV to look like (I've only seen 30 line mechanical TV, but I've read that up to 180 line mechanical TVs existed, but electronic TV was already out then and soon dominated the market). Even Long Play VHS recordings look High Def compared to that Orion... And yes, it also takes several hours to download 1 MB of photos through a serial cable on WIndows 3.11 (the manual says the software will NOT run on 95) (the camera has 2MB of internal flash memory, but an arbitrary 96 file limit which, at the fixed non-changeable compression, amounts to a maximum of around 1.2MB). Funnily, the photos look best on the internal screen, followed by the AV output, and by far the worst they look on the computer - and yes, I used the proprietary built-in JIFF viewer that came with the camera software and yes, I set the video card to 640x480 with 24 bits of color (usually I have it at 1024x768 with 256 colors because I love those palette cycling screensavers and the high resolution).
Man, I bought a pair of these and a couple extra for my 5yr olds before we went on a cruise and they absolutely loved them. The ones I got look almost identical but were a couple bucks more and came with a waterproof shell so they could get some pictures underwater. Everything off of this is potato quality but it makes 'em happy.
Much better than the cheapest Vivitar digital camera that I got for Christmas 2004, that had insane motion blur if anything moved at all, no screen, and stored photos on SRAM not flash so if the batteries died everything was lost.
I had a Vivitar but it recorded to SD card if I remember correctly. But it would corrupt the image files if you tried to read them in another card reader instead of connecting the camera through usb.
The poor images and the no copyright music is a huge throwback. I'm watching this on a 2007 macbook. It feels weird like I've time traveled to have this familiar aesthetic I haven't seen in years.
I fell in love with the cheap thermal printer digital cameras a while back, and wound up with more of those than I'd care to admit. 📷 They take me back to the gameboy-camera days, and are so cheap to run, that they actually see use--unlike expensive instant/zink options.
My first toy camera was a 20 dollar clip on camera and it ran on 2 AA batteries and used SDRAM which means if the batteries are removed the pictures go bye bye. The quality of pictures was worse than this camera, super compressed. This toy camera barely even had a half megapixel but it was my first digital camera and I took a lot of grainy pics on it. My next one was a credit card sized camera and took better pictures but only pictures. Both of these used the download to PC type interface and not mass storage. The one after that was the Aiptek DV-4500 which was my first real digital camera and video camera and I shot all of my oldest youtube vids on plus family videos and all. I still have it and it still works. The other two cameras I have no idea where they are at the moment.
My child has a similar camera with a black and white printer attached that prints picture via what seem to be the same technology as store receipts. She loves her camera, plays games, music, prints pictures and makes silly videos.
You should definitely use this camera to film some of your future videos for the channel, it brings these sweet 90s vibes, very appropriate. At least for the 1st of April video next year.
Now we know how Jeremy Parish records the intro for his videos!! 😂 I'm pretty sure that is about the same level of hardware I got for my kid during a business trip about 12 years ago. Only his was styled as the point and shoots of that time, without the "kid" coating. Also: are the pictures stretched to 16:9 straight from the camera, or was that an oversight during editing?
2 things when you were in the menus: The date/time settings were _right there_ for the timestamp, and you skipped over it. No wonder you couldn't find it. Also, you can set the resolution to "1080p" while the camera is set to VGA because the photo and video modes are completely separate.
My daughter received that camera for Christmas. It was fun to watch your video and have her pull her camera back out. FYI - the "view finder" on hers is actually a selfie camera. And, alas, hers does not include Tetris. :-(
In around 2005 I had a tiny digital camera that was on a keychain and it took images at either 640x480 or 320x240 resolution or something like that and I think it could only hold like 20 pictures on internal storage - but at the time that was amazing (my only other cameras were disposable 35mm ones)
My kid got something like this for Christmas from a family member - it's not half bad. There are some really neat borders and filters you can apply to the camera for some silly fun, and it's an inexpensive way to get your kid taking photos, making movies, etc. Put your kid in a laundry basket and push them around a room with a bunch of stuffed animals set up, some trigger-able "events", etc. and play make-believe "Pokemon Snap" (that's on our to-do list). You could also use the movie function to help them learn/grasp how a movie is planned, written, and captured. And then you've got games on top of all of that? Pretty dang cool, if you ask me. I wasn't thrilled about the idea of plugging this thing into my computer (who knows what's hiding in that firmware/software), but I've got a throw-away Linux laptop we can use. Could be a lot of fun if you're not obsessed with high-quality cameras/if being a grown-up hasn't blinded you to the truth about diminishing returns, making you think you need to spend hundreds of dollars to have a good time (you don't).
The sound quality reminds me of a VHS-C camcorder in EP mode, and I'm shocked there's no compression artifacts (the noise probably covers it up), and the video isn't as bad as I expected, but the lens is bad enough that the exposure has to be high enough to cause some smear, and that's in a studio with good lighting. Not the worse thing for the price, but I'd rather spend $7 on one of those pipe inspection cameras that output composite.
Oh my god I never thought something I bought from H&M (a clothing brand) would be reviewed. I bought this solely for wanting a camera that takes photos like in the 90s for my kids to see as if I lived in the old days. I love this toy so much.
The video test about ten minutes in honestly reminds me of a lot of VHS-era recordings, only with way worse sound. I reckon if you had a separate mic to record decent audio you could get some really cool a e s t h e t i c videos out of this thing. For $7, it's such a neat little gadget.
This thing is roughly en par with my Logitech ClickSmart 510 from 1999. That one can only do 640x480 but it has better dynamic range and color fidelity. Overall image quality is very similar though. I do have cameras from the early 2000s that are worse. But I also have a few that can still take on a decent recent model smartphone camera.
Ok, this is just from experience with these types of cameras, i have a bunch of similar ones with M12 thread and this looks like the exact same size, you just have to get the focus right and make sure the lens body is long enough to hit the sensor focal plane. You can do distortion correction in lightroom.
there is usually a compromise you have to decide when focusing the lens, between true infinity and a fixed point if you want to use the camera for any up close photography at all, I would recommend ordering a longer bodied lens and cutting a bigger hole in the front, that will allow you to have manual focus control
With any cheap digital cameras like that one shown in this video the only good thing about cheap digital cameras is that they do have like a found footage vibe to them or looks like some old digital cameras used to have back in the day but even back then there were better cameras but more expensive
i use the little cameras for robots back in the day . they been around for years and have always been 7 to 10 bucks and are great to have for little optics
No matter how bad it is, the sole fact that you can have a full fledged camera that has a speaker, rechargable battery AND plays games/music for $7 is absolutely insane
*_child labour left the chat_*
@@AmirRazan Child labor for a child's toy, sounds legit!
Absolutely. In 1999, you could buy a basic digital camera called JamCam that shot VGA only, could only hold a handful of shots, and cost $99. 24 years later, you can buy a vastly superior and more capable digital camera for kids for $7.
If that surprises you, I bought a 6$ "smartwatch" off ebay and it actually came, it was brand new, had two batteries (that lasted, oh some minutes), and the thing had a vga camera, sim card reader (yes it's even a phone, and that actually worked). And that was like 5-6 years ago.
In china 7usd is worth a lot more then it is in the usa and also
the chinese government subsidizes shipping costs that is why its free
that's why item from china are so cheap
It definitely hits that 2004 era phone camera. It also seems like it's taking photos in a 4:3 aspect ratio and then stretching them to 16:9, which is weird because the video recording seems to be actually widescreen. Such a weird little device.
Imagine making a low budget found footage horror move with that. It'd be perfect.
my thoughts exactly
Total budget $21 for a high-quality 3-camera setup!
frlll
probably only records about 20 seconds at a time, lol
Still better than some security cameras.
"Do you know this person?"
"... I thought that was a head of lettuce TF"
My daughter has this camera. I will also add that, as you fill up the SD card, the image capture speed gets slower and slower. My daughter has taken thousands of photos, and it now has a 3 second delay from pressing the shutter button to actual image capture.
I bet if you checked out the firmware whatever poor CPU is in it has to read the entire contents of the SD card to figure out what to make the filename.
Now your daughter needs a computer to dump the files and an online backup to archive them. :)
3 seconds is pretty good compared to even high end digital cameras from just like 15-20 years ago.
I'd guess has to store the images to the SD before it can show you the result. And because of the way flash memory works, once it's gotten sort if full the card's controller may have shuffle some data around so it can erase enough blocks to have space.
I can’t view the pictures when the SD card is in?? Anyone have this issue?
Yeah. Bought one of these a year or two ago for our daughter when she went to camp. I was totally ok if she broke it ir lost it as she is terrible with taking care of her stuff, somehow she still has it, and it still works.
I think she loves it.
Back in the day, (~2000 or so) i had a little "Intel Pocket PC Camera"... a webcam that could be disconnected from your pc, and it had battery and some memory for about 60 640x480 images that were HIGHLY jpeg compressed, and SUPER saturated. No controls or display on it. It took wonderfully horrible pictures. :D
I had a spy pen camera like that i think it took like 8 pictures and they always sucked lol
It actually looks like vhs which is a great thing nowadays. I saw this camera being sold in my local area supermarket in Poland and if this is the same model I’d love to grab one myself
My kids have two of these cameras. The empty “viewfinder” space is actually for a selfie camera! Some models have two camera modules, one for each direction. Keeps little kids entertained for hours
That's a 24-pin camera module, and they come in a variety of spec levels and with a ton of different lens options, including things like C-mount. Perhaps a follow up video testing it out with an assortment of cheap lenses from Aliexpress?
Can you adapt it to an raspberry pi w 22pin?
I think this is the same camera my mom bought my daughter for Christmas (she has early dementia, and did really think about the fact that it was 2022 and my daughter has an iPhone 8 and iPad Air 5). I think I spent 30 mins playing with it, and my kid played with it for maybe 5 mins lol. It’s really funny, and did remind me of a camera from the 90s / early 2000s.
The spirit of the 90s is alive in this $7 camera
I actually think the "viewfinder" hole is for a selfie camera, because it has the same screw posts as the camera.
You're correct. I have a "premium" version of this camera, and there's a selfie camera in the viewfinder slot.
That 8-pin chip near the SoC looks like it's probably the ROM, and I would bet it's most likely an SPI ROM chip. That means you can dump it and find out a bit more about how it works, or even write a custom firmware.
Seems it's old MTK Chip. As the GUI Is t he same as the MTK GUI..
Modding that thing could be fun
There's a whole photographic concept based around bad cameras like this called lomography, it's pretty fun! There's also a Lomography company that makes intentionally bad or just weird films that can be pretty sweet (and they're also basically the only place that remembers 110 film exists these days).
As an owner of a 110 camera, let me tell you, there are dozens of us! Dozens!
@@gabotron94 The rare 110 gang meeting in the wild! 🤝
My younger sister has Chinese camera with similar UI design overall. So I’m pretty sure it’s running similar firmware to this. And here’s some interesting things I found(which may or may not apply to this exact camera):
- If you insert unformatted SD card, it will format it *without asking*.
- If you plug in USB cable without SD card attached, it acts as crappy USB camera.
- I tried filling SD card with random bytes, and startup/shutdown image was corrupted sometimes. Nice programming :D
- Startup/shutdown image is user-replaceable.
You should create a whole episode using this camera. 🤣
Yes please!
it's an amusing idea but that audio is just unintelligible.
Keep good audio but use $7 camera..
Not really, not a full-fledged video, maybe a short?
Alternate reality where Action Retro started back in 2006 and that was just the camera he used.
I have to imagine that you would LOVE the PXL2000 if you ever got your hands on one.
(It's a toy video camera from the 1980s that uses compact cassette, and is (in)famous for its weird image quality.)
My friend had one when I was a kid. We made slasher video's with it. I remember making a straw dummy and throwing him out my bedroom window in one video.
The 8-bit guy reviewed something like that a long time ago. Is it the same model?
I just got one of those and mine has a Spreadrum SC6531F chip, which is apparently a low-end smartphone processor.
Right now I'm doing a mod to add a focus adjustment option to the camera (aka I drilled a channel on the plastic housing for the camera module, and added a rigid wire wound around and glued to the lens, so I have an "arm" to control the focus with).
Mine arrived today and it is glorious. AR completely glosssed over the frames and filters! I am super excited to see if someone can't get the firmware and modify it...
To me its funny how so many folks are mentioning their old flip phone camera's. For me, this video makes me think back to our families first digital camera, a OG Apple Quicktake 100 we got new in late 94. I still have many fond memories of that old camera
Nah, the Quicktake took sharper and non-stretched photos. LGR has reviewed it, so you can put it side-by-side with the photos from this video.
That was actually quite a revolutionary camera, being well under $1000 and color. The Computer Chronicles did an episode on digital cameras in '93 and a QVGA black and white camera was about $800 (it did have a built in printer though). 90s tech, am I right.
This looks like a great gift for a child. My toddler still throws things around, so maybe in a couple years they’ll have one with better specs 😅 (hopefully, but probably not).
Wasn't expecting a DankPods reference but here we are.
These photos look like they were shot on the DSi or 3ds. A neat aesthetic.
I'm a sucker for old camera tech. Always on the lookout at second hand shops. The find this week was a Panasonic Lumix dmc-fs15 for 5 bucks. Compact, still works great and battery holds a good charge. Sometimes I forget my phone is a camera, but when I have a point and shoot camera with me, I tend to take more photos of fun random things.
I found a 2002 cybershot pocket camera, with 64mb memory stick at a yard sale for $1 6 years ago. It was my main camera the rest of my teenage years, and it still works, but the plastic lens is foggy now, and cleaning it doesn't help, pictures are still decent though.
Me too- though I tend toward film cameras and developing paraphernalia. On the digital side the Mavica is probably my favorite item in my collection.
Had just been looking for this kind of low quality ultra compressed garbo for a while. Its nice that its quite modern and eliminates a ton of the quirks from actual turn of the millenium cameras
I still use a Lumix LC1 and L1 a lot, the former being a fixed lens 5mp CCD camera with an amazing lens and build quality, and the latter being a Four Thirds ILC at around 7mp with a live-mos sensor. You have to really understand proper lighting, but if you shoot properly they still put out some great images considering the age of the tech.
I'd love to see a crazy modding community for this thing
Someone up above said they reckon the firmware could be dumped! I have one on the way...
Wow...better than most windows laptop web cams
Wow, this is reminiscent of the worst digital camera I ever owned, which was a DXG-308 purchased in 2004 or 2005. I actually got it bundled with an Epson inkjet printer. I don't know if I paid $75 for the printer and got a free camera, or if I paid $75 for the camera and got a free printer. At the time, either by itself normally cost more than that. The printer was actually pretty good; it printed well and lasted for about 5 years. The camera, on the other hand, was awful. It ate batteries for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and that was even before you turned it on. The feature set and controls looked pretty good, but the CCD and optics were so bad that the only way it could take pictures in anything approaching true color was outside on bright, sunny days, and nothing was focused all that well. My daughter used it to take a picture of a historic building, and the tower on the building came out bent 90 degrees to the left and then another 90 degrees back up. I mean, it was an interesting-looking building, but not quite THAT interesting in real life.
That camera would be great for taking pictures of cats or UFOs!
Actually, it is too good for UFO videos or photos.
You're right
I have been thinking the Raspberry Pi Foundation should make a kids camera. They make all the hardware. People could use it as a webcam, machine learning platform. Put Joycon rails on the side and people can play games on it.
Action Dank Pods
Is it just me or are the still pictures 4:3 but stretched into widescreen?
That's what I was thinking. Which is even more weird because the video capture is actually widescreen lol
What a cromulent nugget to play Scarlet Fire on!
I bought one of these for my daughter awhile back. It was great for her to get started.
Back when I bought my first $400 2MP camera at Comp USA, I never envisioned a camera could be $7. :) Time flies... Was it wrong that I kept hearing Wayne's World "extreme closeup!" when you were recording your cats? :P
Nostalgia's great, isn't it?
Being that they were both attached via ribbon cable, my thought was to see how they work with a raspberry pi
Assuming the interface has the correct pinout for a RPi. Many Chinese-made camera modules don't.
@@stamasd8500 fair point
if they can work with a raspi, probably the result will be a 'better' ugly camera.
@@arlandi I was initially thinking about it when he talked about how good the screen was. The camera would still be crappy likely. But a good mini screen for that cheap could be a good find
640x480 used to be the prime VGA native resolution...and was thus the target of online real estate listing from 1994-2000
I remember having a camera in the late 90s that took pics like that. No video or games though and it lost its memory if it got switched off or the (really odd and hard to find) non rechargeable battery ran out. Lost loads of photos by accidently switching the thing off before uploading them to pc via a horribly slow usb1 connection to a really basic proprietary photo importer thingy.
I checked taobao (Aliexpress), $7 for standard version, $9.9 for "HD" version and $12.9for 9.6M version. Three years warranty. And you can add a very cute silicone case. For 3+ kids.
I do not think the videos or pictures are that bad and I love your sweet & cute kitties.
I may have to buy one of these and see how they do just for fun.
I don’t think any of his sweet &cute kitties are for sale….
@@staggerwings I meant the camera silly.
this is the camera they used to take photos of big foot and aliens
I am actually impressed by this as it costs less than 10 bucks.
As a kid I would have died for this and mom might actually have been able to get me this camera because it is so low priced.
similar thougths. As a camera to take videos outdoors, starting video editing - that thing would work. Sure, it is seriously limited, but this leads to a certain aesthetics and artistic limitations.
Where's the brown sofa? 😉
Hahaha
I bought one of these for my daughter last year. She completely loves it.
That looks like good value.
You have an army of beautiful cats?
My daughters both got the “upgraded” model and I can confirm that is hole is not for a viewfinder but is in fact a hole for a front facing camera… or rear depending on what your definition of front is for a camera.
That shell screams that it’s been repurposed from something else having a viewfinder hole and speaker grille that is not aligned to anything.
6:04 "Yeah, can record some videos of my hands doing things": yeah, we've been watching those for years actually :)
I saw and read the comment at the same time he said so 😂
You can make vintage style ad parodies with that thing
+1 for MST3K reference. Keep Circulating The tapes!
I remember spending many hundreds of pounds on a Casio QV-10 digital camera in 94 or 95, can't quite remember. The quality of its pictures was about on par with this! maybe a little better from memory but that might be the years... I remember it took 320x240 images, was extremely slow and generally terrible to use with glacial serial cable uploads of the exciting terrible pictures I took to my Windows 3.1 PC.
Oh goodness!!! This post made me feel the impatient stress that I mistook for excitement back then 😅.
I have an Orion DigiSnap DS21 from 1994 but made in 1996 and sold in 1999 and from the looks of it never really used.
It takes 320x240 images too, compresses them into jpeg (which was still called JIFF back then) at ca. 10% quality so the only purpose your photos have is to teach computer science students how JPEG compression works. You can barely make out what you shot. The image quality of this camera is abysmal, it's about as good as I imagine 100 line mechanical TV to look like (I've only seen 30 line mechanical TV, but I've read that up to 180 line mechanical TVs existed, but electronic TV was already out then and soon dominated the market). Even Long Play VHS recordings look High Def compared to that Orion...
And yes, it also takes several hours to download 1 MB of photos through a serial cable on WIndows 3.11 (the manual says the software will NOT run on 95) (the camera has 2MB of internal flash memory, but an arbitrary 96 file limit which, at the fixed non-changeable compression, amounts to a maximum of around 1.2MB). Funnily, the photos look best on the internal screen, followed by the AV output, and by far the worst they look on the computer - and yes, I used the proprietary built-in JIFF viewer that came with the camera software and yes, I set the video card to 640x480 with 24 bits of color (usually I have it at 1024x768 with 256 colors because I love those palette cycling screensavers and the high resolution).
Man, I bought a pair of these and a couple extra for my 5yr olds before we went on a cruise and they absolutely loved them. The ones I got look almost identical but were a couple bucks more and came with a waterproof shell so they could get some pictures underwater. Everything off of this is potato quality but it makes 'em happy.
A nice multiplicity of Kitties at the end
Much better than the cheapest Vivitar digital camera that I got for Christmas 2004, that had insane motion blur if anything moved at all, no screen, and stored photos on SRAM not flash so if the batteries died everything was lost.
I had a Vivitar but it recorded to SD card if I remember correctly. But it would corrupt the image files if you tried to read them in another card reader instead of connecting the camera through usb.
I didn't quite get vaporwave but I definitely got crusty mid-2000s real estate photo vibes, so it might make for some great liminal space photos.
The poor images and the no copyright music is a huge throwback. I'm watching this on a 2007 macbook. It feels weird like I've time traveled to have this familiar aesthetic I haven't seen in years.
I fell in love with the cheap thermal printer digital cameras a while back, and wound up with more of those than I'd care to admit. 📷 They take me back to the gameboy-camera days, and are so cheap to run, that they actually see use--unlike expensive instant/zink options.
My first toy camera was a 20 dollar clip on camera and it ran on 2 AA batteries and used SDRAM which means if the batteries are removed the pictures go bye bye. The quality of pictures was worse than this camera, super compressed. This toy camera barely even had a half megapixel but it was my first digital camera and I took a lot of grainy pics on it. My next one was a credit card sized camera and took better pictures but only pictures. Both of these used the download to PC type interface and not mass storage. The one after that was the Aiptek DV-4500 which was my first real digital camera and video camera and I shot all of my oldest youtube vids on plus family videos and all. I still have it and it still works. The other two cameras I have no idea where they are at the moment.
I have one of those! And that shirt! 😂
My child has a similar camera with a black and white printer attached that prints picture via what seem to be the same technology as store receipts. She loves her camera, plays games, music, prints pictures and makes silly videos.
You should definitely use this camera to film some of your future videos for the channel, it brings these sweet 90s vibes, very appropriate. At least for the 1st of April video next year.
Now we know how Jeremy Parish records the intro for his videos!! 😂
I'm pretty sure that is about the same level of hardware I got for my kid during a business trip about 12 years ago. Only his was styled as the point and shoots of that time, without the "kid" coating.
Also: are the pictures stretched to 16:9 straight from the camera, or was that an oversight during editing?
2 things when you were in the menus:
The date/time settings were _right there_ for the timestamp, and you skipped over it. No wonder you couldn't find it.
Also, you can set the resolution to "1080p" while the camera is set to VGA because the photo and video modes are completely separate.
A handheld version of a Delorean time machine! Instantly transported back to just 1998 .
Seriously awful pictures, but I'm impressed with the amount of technology you get for seven bucks.
My daughter received that camera for Christmas. It was fun to watch your video and have her pull her camera back out.
FYI - the "view finder" on hers is actually a selfie camera.
And, alas, hers does not include Tetris. :-(
"200 years of evolution and we've barely even tapped the vastness of photography potential."
In around 2005 I had a tiny digital camera that was on a keychain and it took images at either 640x480 or 320x240 resolution or something like that and I think it could only hold like 20 pictures on internal storage - but at the time that was amazing (my only other cameras were disposable 35mm ones)
My kid got something like this for Christmas from a family member - it's not half bad. There are some really neat borders and filters you can apply to the camera for some silly fun, and it's an inexpensive way to get your kid taking photos, making movies, etc. Put your kid in a laundry basket and push them around a room with a bunch of stuffed animals set up, some trigger-able "events", etc. and play make-believe "Pokemon Snap" (that's on our to-do list). You could also use the movie function to help them learn/grasp how a movie is planned, written, and captured. And then you've got games on top of all of that? Pretty dang cool, if you ask me. I wasn't thrilled about the idea of plugging this thing into my computer (who knows what's hiding in that firmware/software), but I've got a throw-away Linux laptop we can use. Could be a lot of fun if you're not obsessed with high-quality cameras/if being a grown-up hasn't blinded you to the truth about diminishing returns, making you think you need to spend hundreds of dollars to have a good time (you don't).
Oddly, it looks as if it's actually trying to upscale the images. I guess it's also pushing them out from 4x3 to 16x9?
Interesting! I bought this for my 2 year old daughter about a month ago for her birthday!
The sound quality reminds me of a VHS-C camcorder in EP mode, and I'm shocked there's no compression artifacts (the noise probably covers it up), and the video isn't as bad as I expected, but the lens is bad enough that the exposure has to be high enough to cause some smear, and that's in a studio with good lighting. Not the worse thing for the price, but I'd rather spend $7 on one of those pipe inspection cameras that output composite.
I've heard scarlet fire so many times now, it's like the unofficial theme of youtube! Thanks for showing us this nugget!
ASHENS NAME DROP.
Ah, I love the internet.
AND SCARLET FIRE !!!!!! CRIKEY! WHAT A NUGGET!!!!!
That looks like a hidden camera from 2001 or something. You can literally count the pixels on a 4k monitor like squared paper.
I loved how you played Scarlet Fire on this
"man, this really hits like a dankpods video, what a nugget this camera i....is...is that scarlet fire?!" nice
Oh my god I never thought something I bought from H&M (a clothing brand) would be reviewed. I bought this solely for wanting a camera that takes photos like in the 90s for my kids to see as if I lived in the old days. I love this toy so much.
The video test about ten minutes in honestly reminds me of a lot of VHS-era recordings, only with way worse sound. I reckon if you had a separate mic to record decent audio you could get some really cool a e s t h e t i c videos out of this thing. For $7, it's such a neat little gadget.
The low light work on that is great. I'm hoping you'll be shooting alternate shots with it for all your videos now.
The start up tone of the camera sounds very much like the ActiveSync Windows CE desktop PC synchronisation software making contact with a PDA.
This thing is roughly en par with my Logitech ClickSmart 510 from 1999. That one can only do 640x480 but it has better dynamic range and color fidelity. Overall image quality is very similar though.
I do have cameras from the early 2000s that are worse. But I also have a few that can still take on a decent recent model smartphone camera.
the lens is m12 thread, there are tons of options that can fit on that sensor assembly
I have taken the punt on this comment and ordered one of these cameras and a M12 fisheye lens. Is there anything I should know about tuning the image?
Ok, this is just from experience with these types of cameras, i have a bunch of similar ones with M12 thread and this looks like the exact same size, you just have to get the focus right and make sure the lens body is long enough to hit the sensor focal plane. You can do distortion correction in lightroom.
there is usually a compromise you have to decide when focusing the lens, between true infinity and a fixed point if you want to use the camera for any up close photography at all, I would recommend ordering a longer bodied lens and cutting a bigger hole in the front, that will allow you to have manual focus control
If you plug it into a computer, does it show up as anything? Maybe the IDs and stuff could help figure out what system it's running?
cat videos like it's 2004 again
Wait... Not one, not two, but THREE KITTIES?!
I have an older version of that camera that doesn't have the same version of the OS it can only take videos and record
It's like someone's high school project they've put into production
With any cheap digital cameras like that one shown in this video the only good thing about cheap digital cameras is that they do have like a found footage vibe to them or looks like some old digital cameras used to have back in the day but even back then there were better cameras but more expensive
This totally did turn into an Ashens video and I love it.
i use the little cameras for robots back in the day . they been around for years and have always been 7 to 10 bucks and are great to have for little optics
The code on the chip has gotta mean week 46 of year 22 (or whatever it was)
I want magic lantern port of all that software unironically
I used one for parts to make a mini tv, 3d printed a case and installed the pcb and screen, Cheap and good for parts.
Nice, I looking inside gizmo's as well, I wonder if that Camera Lens will work with MIPI-CSI interface on a Raspberry PI ...
Those photos remind me so much of the ones I took with my Treo in the early 2000s!
I think some of the opening frames from the Adrian's Digital Basement intro were shot with this bad boy. 📸
That viewfinder area looks suspiciously like it's meant to hold a webcam module, maybe for selfie mode.