I’m sure everyone has seen this really cool motion picture camera that was announced this week: The Camp Snap CS-8. It’s billed as a return to “…a creative experience.”
The unit looks cool kinda like the Yashica SU60-E I used to make film loops with back in the mid 90s. It has some cool features for a digital camera at a decent price point at $149 for preorder. I got really excited and was planning on laying down the bread to order one, that was until I had a hard time finding any specs on their website.
The camera has some groovy features. I really like the gauges on the sides that show battery as well as the one on the opposite side showing the amount of data left on the SD card.
The device looks like a lot of fun, and I really am drawn to the old days when you shot something and you weren’t totally sure what it would look like until it was processed. Unfortunately the site has no specs on the camera, chip, or lens, which brought me to the internets for more research.
What I found was this:
“The CS-8’s lens is a tiny 3.19mm with an f/2 aperture, and a small sensor that prioritizes retro looks over sharpness. The 8x zoom is digital, not optical, so you’ll lose some quality when you zoom. Video resolution is a mystery—some say 4K at 30fps in certain aspect ratios, others 480p. I found the truth to be closer to the latter, especially with the filters applied.”
Which is very unfortunate. I totally get that super 8 was a sub-par format, quality-wise. But today we don’t use home projectors which, when used in living rooms across the country in the 1960s looked pretty good. Even a projector for television doesn’t work the same as a super-8 projector. They all have a higher resolution. It would have been a sweet deal had they provided for a 4k image capture, with size reductions for instagram or tik-tok (nobody cares on those platforms how good it looks since they are only going to see them for a few seconds anyways). Maybe they couldn’t meet that price point with those specs.
Either way, that money is going to stay in my pocket. Bummer….