Good for Kodak, bad for the rest of us. Everybody is wild for cheap point-and-shoot cameras these days, and so Kodak leaned on its very rich historical catalog of cameras long out of production.
They may be having serious survival issues, but they hit a home run with the Charmera, a $30 digital camera that Kodak unveiled on September 17, 2025, at 11:00 p.m. EST. According to USA Today, they all sold out within eight minutes.
what’s a charmera?
There are a lot of layers to this one. First, it’s a pun on the word chimera. The chimera was a Greek mythological beast, and it’s come to mean a creature that’s a hybrid of two or more creatures.
The Charmera is such a beast. It marries the look of the very not-digital 1987 Kodak Fling with a low-resolution digital image sensor, reminiscent of early 2000s digital cameras, which are also still riding a wave of interest. It’s a digital camera masquerading as a very compact film camera.
That’s not all. It’s so small, it comes with a key ring so that you can attach it to your keychain. Just look at the size of the thing. It’s smaller than just being a small camera. It’s almost like it’s a charm, like on a charm bracelet… Get it?
The Charmera is a blend of two camera styles—analog looks with digital guts—and so small that you attach it to a keychain as if it were a little charm bracelet. There are seven different color schemes, but you can’t choose which one you’ll get.
Each is a blind box, meaning you know what you get after you open it. Kodak does list entire collections, if you feel like you want all seven color schemes of the Charmera.
The original run went quickly, but Kodak says that it’ll announce a new run, so you haven’t blown your chance to get one yet. We don’t yet know when the next run of Charmeras will drop, but keep an eye on Kodak’s website.
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