When wading into the plastic-strewn waters of toy cameras and weirdly branded scameras, you’d be foolish to expect image quality. I certainly don’t! What I’m looking for in cheap cameras like this is fun factor. The Kodak Charmera works not because it makes high quality images, but because it’s small, pocketable, easy to use, and fun. At the very least, the Charmera makes consistently dodgy photos, so I know what to expect.

The Chuzhao is a tiny plastic TLR-inspired digital toy camera. It has no menu system, a nice colour screen shaded by a flimsy plastic hood, and a bunch of awkwardly placed buttons that seem to operate according to cryptic laws – hold down one button to access the photo album then twist the tiny silver crank on the side of the camera to select a photo, then press another button to delete. Like I said, it’s cryptic. It’s a good thing the basic operation of the camera is easy enough.

My first impression is that the Chuzhao TLR-inspired camera can make surprisingly detailed photos in good light. In low light, it’s an impressionist painter’s worst nightmare – more oversmoothing than exists in half a dozen Kodak Charmeras combined. They’re not even worth salvaging in the best photo editing programs. I don’t believe all the AI in the world could save the worst of these photos without significant insertion of generated content. But as you can see in both the photos above and below, the detail possible can be surprisingly good for such a toy.

I need to make an admission: all of these photos have been ever so slightly edited. As with my Charmera pictures, I’ve added film grain to break up the oversmoothing, reduced the Clarity to make it look less sharp, and added some extra warmth.

The Chuzhao camera is a strange device. It’s not as unobtrusive as the Kodak Charmera because it’s not really small enough to fit into a pocket comfortably without it feeling like you’ve stuck too many Mars Bars in there. And because it features the classic TLR top-down view, it takes time to compose pictures and isn’t going to be your friend when you want to use it in other positions and angles. I can quickly grab a photo with the Charmera, but the Chuzhao demands more attention, making it not quite as fun or as convenient.

I do think there’s something positive to be said for using the Chuzhao in good light in the included black and white filter mode (mine is actually sepia tinted, so I just desaturated it during editing). And the inclusion of auto-focus (yes, auto-focus in a toy camera) means that it’s capable of close-focussing and blurring backgrounds. That in itself is pretty cool. Being fixed focus only, the Charmera can’t do that. Neither can the Camp Snap.

The Chuzhao is worth a look if you buy it cheaply. It’s available on a wide range of sites and I wouldn’t be surprised if quite a number of those listed are just copies of copies with different innards – so you take your chances with something like this.