It’s 3 AM, and you’ve found yourself scrolling through Amazon’s Best Sellers list of digital cameras, and you’ve come across a tiny, pink 44-megapixel compact camera, which purportedly has zoom (pink was sold out, so we got white instead). And on second look, you see it’s $40! You click “Buy Now” and don’t think about it again until the branded box arrives and you come face to face with the CamKory US-DC403L-S (CamKory from here on out). Did you just throw away your money while trying to cure insomnia (or hangover – no judgement)?
What does the CamKory US-DC403L-S Offer?
For around $30 USD, this Amazon Best Seller lists an ultra-compact digital camera sporting a 1/1.8-inch sensor (something akin to an older smartphone or even a 5th-generation iPod Touch) capable of producing 44-megapixel images. Outside of the sensor itself, the camera boasts some “real” camera features like continuous shooting “burst” mode, 16x digital zoom, multiple image filters, self-timer, and even digital image stabilization – neat! On paper, the CamKory digital camera appears to be a good enough camera that can find itself as part of a travel bag when you don’t necessarily want to bring a “serious” camera or fear damaging/losing a more expensive point-and-shoot.
For $40, you may not care that the camera feels like it was made of paper-thin plastic that will crack and shatter by simply looking at it hard enough, but a camera is only as good as the amount of life and joy it can bring you.
The CamKory Experience
While things on paper can often appear to be enticing or even impressive, reality can sometimes quickly bring things right down to earth. For $40, you may not care that the camera feels like it was made of paper-thin plastic that will crack and shatter by simply looking at it hard enough, but a camera is only as good as the amount of life and joy it can bring you. This camera’s shoddy build makes me wonder if this is a literal one-time use camera – which isn’t what digital disposable cameras should be about.
When trying to shoot or press any button, the camera seemed to have a lot of give, becoming bendy at points. Worse yet, many of those button presses would not register with a normal press and required a prolonged press that would often cause you to navigate to another menu item, overshoot your desired zoom range, or outright not register a shutter press. It was by far one of the worst experiences I’ve had using a camera in a long time. I even tried using the “smile shutter” option, and that NEVER worked.
CamKory includes a 32GB microSD card and two batteries with your purchase. Dump the software; it caused Lightroom to crash multiple times while trying to get the images off the card – this did not happen with a SanDisk microSD card I ended up using. As for the batteries, you will absolutely need them. After about 20 minutes of walking around, not shooting continuously, I found the camera to get extremely hot, and shortly after it went from a fully charged battery to completely dead. Two batteries will last you about 2 hours if you’re lucky.
“Sure, sure. But what about the images?” you might ask. Well, the truth is that the final results are a mixed bag. For the purposes of this article, I didn’t touch these images at all: bad compositions stayed, deranged-looking selfies of me trying to get the smile shutter to engage, all of it. For what it’s worth, if you only plan on using this camera outdoors in daylight, then you might get your money’s worth. Other than that, expect muddy images at anything above ISO100.
All images below are straight out of camera.
Was This Worth It?
To be fair, CamKory lists this model as a camera for kids. If it were strictly something that you’re using to give to a child in hopes that they do not damage your “grown-up” camera, it might be worth it instead of repairing or replacing something exponentially more expensive. I can see this possibly as a toy camera (think Holga) that I’d only use at ISO 100 with the intention of using it outdoors, but in the end, I feel that the restrictions, poor build quality, and poor battery life are simply not worth the nostalgic look of retro-digital (buy our presets instead).
Still want one for yourself? You can purchase one on Amazon.