Turning our phones into pocket cameras was such a success (or curse, depending on your mood) that everywhere from beach to brunch you see them held aloft, following by the instant consultation whereby the phone is brought down again to face level for the photo taker to analyze, overanalyze, and then try again.Whether by smartphone or DSLR, the ritual is the same. Snap photo, analyze photo, delete, snap again. Anybody, no matter how serious or amateurish, can perfect their shot at the expense of being drawn out of the fun and spontaneity of snapping pictures in the moment.The way we did back when pocket cameras were film, before we could obsess over the instant gratification (or instant self-flagellation) provided by the built-in screen. The Camp Snap isn’t designed to replace your smartphone camera or your serious camera. It’s built solely to have fun. And looked at through that lens, that’s where it succeeds best.(opens in a new window)Camp Snap(opens in a new window)Available at HuckberryBuy Now(opens in a new window)Available at Camp SnapBuy Now(opens in a new window)don’t expect the best image qualityIts specs are not great by modern standards. It’s about as far from an action camera as I’ve ever used. Even mildly quick movements came out as anime-style blurs, and in very close-up shots, the focus was off.And its 8 megapixel, F/1.8 (f=4.8mm), 1/3.2″ sensor won’t win any awards unless it has a time machine to the past that it can borrow, and even that one friend you have who’s still rocking their eight-year-old iPhone will kick its ass in a head-to-head when it comes to image quality. That’s not the point of the Camp Snap.What you see through the viewfinder isn’t exactly what you get, and there’s no way to immediately check the image once you take it — credit: Matt jancerAnd sure, the case plastic feels cheap, but it’s well-put-together, with tight seams and no rough edges. The first thing I did when I removed it from the box was to squeeze firmly all around it to see if it’d flex. It was pure Woody Allen—no flexing.Would it survive being dropped down a staircase? I doubt it. But it never felt like it was going to come apart in my hands or that I had to baby it. I’d bring it to a bar or a café and let my photographer friends go nuts with it. It’d survive. It was less like a baby and more like a cat.Across the front there’s a pebbled vinyl color strip that provides a bit of extra grip. Plus, it dresses up the camera. You can have it in brown, olive, or stealth black for a slightly more “professional” look, although using that term with this camera is really pushing it. Or you can pick a casual, candy-colored yellow, red, or pink.credit: Matt JancerRight now there are 12 colors available, with three of them being limited edition prints. Cow, tartan, and cherry are the limited editions, although that may be different by the time you read this. Camp Snap likes to rotate the selection of special prints to keep things novel and fun.And that’s the point of the Camp Snap. It’s novel and fun. You pull it out at parties or on dance floors or send your kid to school with it. It makes a wonderful camera for a child to use.More than that, perfect for adults who could use a camera that removes the temptation to spend so much time fussing with their camera settings that they’re not mentally present in the moment.Yes, it’s a digital camera, but there’s no screen on the back at all. If I had a cent for every time I looked down at the screen of a normal digital camera to judge, analyze, and overthink the picture I just took, well I’d have a shit ton of pennies (RIP, penny; 1793-2025).dead-simple operationThere’s no focus, no zoom, no way to futz around with manual controls for aperture and focus anyway and all that jazz anyway. You point it at stuff, then you click a button. It’s beyond simple to use.All right, it’s slightly more involved than that. There’s a slider on the back of the case with three settings: off, on, and flash. If I have to explain what those mean, then may I suggest you step back from considering a camera altogether and consider an Etch-a-Sketch.There’s a shutter button up top that you click to take the photo and a fingernail-sized LCD screen that tells you your battery charge level and how many shots you’ve taken. That’s it.credit: Matt JancerThere’s a three-second delay from turning it on—you’ll hear a little noise that plays out of a tinny, tiny speaker that tells you it’s on–and I missed a few shots where the perfect photo op appeared out of nowhere.I’d flick the slider from off to on as I brought the viewfinder up to my eye, I’d click the shutter, and… nothin’. The opportunity came and went before the camera turned on. It’s a minor quibble, but a quibble nonetheless.Just leave the camera set to “on” or “flash” if there’s even a remote chance something interesting to photograph may come your way. It doesn’t draw much energy from the internal, rechargeable battery, anyway. You can take 500 photos on a single charge.looks fuzzy, but remember there’s no digital zoom. This was taken at about 4 PM in waning daylight — credit: Matt jancerThe plastic viewfinder is odd. For one, there’s a bit of distortion looking through the plastic. Two, the corners are blurred out, and only a large circle in the middle is clear. But on the flip side, the LED flash isn’t as bad as you’d think.I was expecting a hideous glare, the likes of which haven’t been seen since Dick Cheney told Patrick Leahy to fuck off on the Senate floor. It was usable, which is more than I can say for a lot of more expensive cameras’ built-in flashes, which are never that great anyway.That said, I didn’t test it out in the worst lighting imaginable, only the semi-dim back corner of a café in the waning hours of the afternoon. In low-light indoor performance, the camera suffered more than in the café.i mean, yeah. that’s rough — credit: Matt jancerFor charging and transferring photos (as jpegs), the Camp Snap comes with a USB-C-to-USB-C cable to plug into the port on the underside of the camera. There’s an internal, removable SD card that comes with the Camp Snap, and it holds 2,000 pictures until it’s full.That’s four full charges worth of photos. If you don’t want to transfer the photos from the camera to your computer, you can remove the SD card and pop it into your computer instead.credit: Matt JancerThere are eyelets molded into the case on each side for attaching a wrist strap or a neck strap. They’re so small in diameter, though, I don’t know what strap would fit through it. Uncooked spaghetti, maybe, as long as it was angel hair. But if you’ve cooked it, forget it.At $65, there’s not much cause to worry about fumbling it off the side of a boat or leaving it in the taxi or having a barfly spill beer on it. Not as much as any other camera, at least.Not having to think much or think hard is a luxury in this world. While there’s not much you should turn a blind eye to these days, a few blessed hours of switching your brain mostly off and just taking pictures was—I don’t know, soothing? It brought back some of the fun spontaneity that I remember of film cameras and the early digital cameras.(opens in a new window)Camp Snap(opens in a new window)Available at HuckberryBuy Now(opens in a new window)Available at Camp SnapBuy Now(opens in a new window)alternativesFlashback: The Flashback chases the same sort of “back-in-the-day, cheap camera” vibe as the Camp Snap, but to an even more severe degree. Fashioned after the one-time-use film, disposable film cameras that predominated daily life until the 2000s, the photographs are digital but you have to wait 24 hours to receive them via app to mimic the wait time of having film rolls developed. It’s more than a bit contrived. I haven’t used it, yet… but it’s at the top of my list to try.Fujifilm Instax Mini EVO: This hybrid digital/film camera is almost the complete opposite of the Camp Snap. You snap pictures and then view them on the screen built into the back of the case, and if you’re happy with it, you hit print. Out pops a film photograph that’ll develop in a couple of minutes. I had a lot of fun snapping images with the Instax Mini EVO and handing them out to friends, but because of the built-in screen—and the obsession with waiting for the perfect image that it brings—snapping pictures with it felt less spontaneous than with the Camp Snap.Lomography 110: Another camera I haven’t had the pleasure of using yet, but which is on my short list for testing, Lomography’s 110 is a compact camera that uses 110 film rather than 35mm film in order to allow for an extremely compact body. Because it’s not digital, there’s no screen to fuss with, no do-overs or instant feedback to obsess over. You press the shutter, you find out what the pictures look like when you get them developed.The post This Point and Shoot Camera Is All Over Instagram and TikTok. But Is It Good? appeared first on VICE.