Well, the algorithm got me, and I bought this tiny camera off of an ad in Instagram. What was the appeal? It’s tiny, it takes photos at a 16:9 aspect ratio (1080x1920), my current favorite ratio, it’s not an iPhone and it’s easy to have everywhere.

How did it do? Terribly, hahaha. It takes really bad photos, sadly. Like, I didn’t find an image scenario that it performed well in. It’s super low-res, so it’s just a large swath of color blocks. It’s unclear what its depth of field is. Surprisingly, it also takes video and that went ok, but I’m never going to use that.

Is this a big loss? No. There is a whole side of photography that is dedicated to toy cameras and they love this stuff. In the spirit of discovery, I messed around with one of it’s images in Lightroom Classic and didn’t get very far - a low-res jpeg is just a low-res jpeg. When I have that situation, sometimes AI comes to the rescue. To try it out, I used Topaz’s Photo AI and asked it to remove noise, sharpen the image and recover detail. While the color chunks are less defined, it just didn’t do much.

I had fun with this camera though and it might be a fun party topic - the fact that it takes photos is sort of mind-blowing. But OMG don’t spend any money on this unless your goal is terrible photos for … reasons.

I’m probably not the only one - what have you bought that didn’t live up to your expectations?