If you haven’t seen or heard of this camera…where have you been? Just type the name into a search engine, and your feed will be flooded with reviews and places you can buy it. The price ranges from £30 to £80, depending on where you buy it. I got mine from eBay for a mid-range price. I bought it for absolutely no other reason than it looked fun to play with, and it was.
Look at the size of it…it is tiny. It fits into the palm of my hand. It arrived quickly and was well packaged. It came with a micro sd card, a power cable, a strap, and instructions.
The instructions were in Chinese, but with the help of Google Translate, that wasn’t a problem.
Here they are:
I quickly figured out how to use it and took it for a local wander to see how well it worked. I found it easy to use. It was fun, but it wasn’t perfect. It suffered from lens aberrations when pointed into the sun and the movie mode was practically useless. There is no sound, that is fine, but using the crank on the side to take the movie, while fun, added to the stabilisation issue. AND there is no stabilisation, so anything that affects that is exacerbated.
Here is a sample video from that first shooting experience:
And here are a few photos from the same walk.
I was surprised to stumble on that burnt-out car; it must be recent, as I walk there quite a bit and have never seen it. Anyway, you can see the shots are square, in keeping with many TLRs. They are also reminiscent of old phone cameras, which isn’t surprising as the lens looks just like a web camera affair.
On this walk, I just pointed and shooted, to see what the results would be. On the next outing, I forgoed any movies as I hated the results, but I did try the only other shooting option, monochrome or rather sepia.
I was impressed with the minimum focal length it would auto focus on, yes, it has auto focus. I do wish the results were fully black and white, though. I must have altered that last image after I downloaded it.
Finally, I took the camera to London for Photo London 25. I will write more on that experience in another post. The camera got a lot of attention, one person even approached me in the street to ask about it, (the Leica photo). So far, I know of two people who have bought the camera based on my Instagram posts. Another friend put his wide-angle viewfinder in front of the lens to see if it would act as an adapter; it did.
Throughout these outings, I had not attached the strap and kept the camera in my pocket. It fit easily and seemed silly on a neck strap, it was far too small for that. Again, I was impressed with the results. For a cheap camera, the auto-focus worked well, the exposure was pretty much perfect, and the low-light results were fine. What’s not to like? Just the movie mode. Get rid of that, give a proper black and white experience, and add a menu system. There is no menu, I can’t see a way to format cards, you have to delete each photo individually, which is a pain.
The camera is definitely worth the lower end of the price range, but I would not pay the upper end.
You can read another, more detailed review here.
https://austerityphoto.co.uk/retro-lo-fi-fun-chuzhao-retro-digital/
Update:
Someone sent me the English instructions, and there is a format function. So that is one issue solved 🙂
The instructions also say it can take video with audio with a long button press, which would negate the rotating, jumping issue. There still would be no stabilisation, but not rotating the crank should improve the results somewhat.