I was digging around in a box of old camera equipment the other week while looking for a tool to clean the sensor on my Nikon D500. I came across an assortment of funny little “toy” cameras that I’d purchased in between around 2008-2011. I had a little low-fi obsession for a while and enjoyed the unpredictability of cameras like the Lomo, the Holga, the Diana.
It’s when I also discovered the Lensbaby lenses, and I now have a major collection of those… ranging from the original optic swap system to the newer standalone lenses.
But I also bought a few really funny little novelty cameras from online sellers like Photojojo and Lomography.
One of the little oddities was called a Digi Clover San – a funny little keychain thing that shoots shitty low-res photos and even crappier video and cost about $25. But what I liked about it was that the video was the digital equivalent of 8mm film. Blurry, slow, no sound, 70’s colour shift. It was amusing and I always liked the retro video, but I never really got into video itself. I always preferred the still image.
But I pulled it out and spent some time today trying to remember how it operates. The instructions were in Japanese…so no help at all. A bit of trial and error while out and about this morning and I eventually remembered how to make it work and got a fabulously crappy, 8mm’esque, video out of it 🙂
The other curiosity is a little thing, also from Japan, called the Digital Harinezumi 2++. Harinezumi is apparently Japanese for Hedgehog…thus the little hedgehog logo on the camera. The camera is about the size of, and looks like, a roll of 110 film. And the images are about as bad. I think I paid somewhere around $50-80 for it back around 2010.
The Digital Harinezumi 2++ has a 3-megapixel CMOS sensor, giving still (.jpg) images 2048×1536 pixels, and 640×480-pixel AVI video, which can be with or without sound (really crappy sound…). It has a 4 mm f/3.0 lens, giving a view roughly equivalent to a 38 mm lens in 35 mm format. This is fixed-focus, said to give a focus range of 1 metre to infinity in normal mode. It also has a macro mode, allowing close-ups at about 3 cm. The sensor can be set to ISO 100 or 800. It has a ten-second self-timer.
This one also caused me some fiddling to remember how it worked, but eventually I got a couple of lousy photos and videos out of it.
However….before just button mashing to figure it out…I did a search for a manual and discovered that they had stopped making them around 2016….and that people were paying between $500 and $1000 (model dependent) for the things today.
I’m sorry….”HOW MUCH?”
Why!?!
I poked around on Ebay.ca and yes, sure enough, for the model I have, used, with no original packaging…..people are paying close to $500 for this silly little thing.
There is a Lomo lens I was eyeballing; it’s about $800…maybe it’s time to unload this little trinket and partially fund my new lens.
I’m a bit gobsmacked that it’s got that sort of value.
It’s just a silly little, low resolution, plastic camera….
Mind blown.