Despite being an objectively terrible digital camera, the Kodak Charmera has been incredibly popular thanks to a cheap price tag and several fun retro designs inspired by the iconic 1987 single-use Kodak Fling. Instead of entirely rethinking that formula, Reto, the company licensing the Kodak brand, is following up on the original Charmera with a Millennium Edition. The seven shiny new designs draw inspiration from the tech and aesthetics of the early 2000s, and at $34.99 each, these will probably once again fly off camera store shelves.
The Charmera Millennium Edition isn’t just about a Y2K facelift. Reto has updated its software with a total of seven photo filters and four new frames that can be applied to images as they’re snapped. While the original Charmera had a black-and-white mode as well as four high-contrast color “pixel” filters, the Millennium Edition expands those filters with four new options including coral, honey, teal, and violet.
Inside the new version of the camera, you’ll find the same hardware as the original, which is disappointing. It still uses a 1.6-megapixel ¼-inch sensor that captures photos at a resolution of just 1,440×1,080 pixels, while videos recorded as AVI files max out at 30fps. That allows you to store thousands of snaps on a microSD card up to 128GB in size, but even in the year 2000, point-and-shoot cameras from companies like Canon and Sony had sensors capturing more than 2-megapixels. Reto isn’t positioning the Charmera as anything other than a photography toy, but moving forward, it will need more than cosmetic refreshes to keep it interesting.
