Review CS-8 Camp Snap CS-8: Simple Video Capture

The field starts CS-8 does not worry about the frame rate, bits installments or if the filming is stabilized at infallible levels of stability. It does not want to replace your iPhone or compete with the configuration of the Mirrorless camera. On the other hand, what offers is something much simpler and more deliberated: the feeling of shooting videos for the good.

Just like the Camp Snap camp Point-and-and-show still camera Since 2023 (the only important product of the company), it is a return to when the cameras have not thought for you and when you didn’t expect to review the images you just captured until after, sometimes much later.

Inspired by the Super 8 cameras introduced in the 1960s, the CS-8 is not apologetically retro both in appearance and in the function. The body is mainly in plastic, with fake-metal details and combing textures intended to evoke the mechanical era rather than imitate it convincingly. It is large and solid in the hand, although in a distinctly Tolike way. If you are looking for authenticity, you will not find it here: there is a fake cold shoe and the imitation screws underlying the pistol’s handle. But this is not the point: this is not the $ 5,000 revival of Kodak, but rather a $ 199 camera destined to live in the real world and to have passed on to parties, crashed into backpacks for a day trips and used without thinking about it.

Lights, camera, action

Photography: Sam Kieldsen

There is no screen, no reproduction and no button delees. Here, what you shoot is what you get. The settings and options are stripped, with a dial for the selection of proportions (4: 3, 16: 9, 1: 1 or 9:16) and another for the video effect. These include standard, monochromatic color and three lo-fi filters, including one that simulates the grainy and shots of the 8 mm film.

I found it the last, labeled analog, was the star of the show. It drops the frequency of the frames to 20 fps (it is 30 fps with the other modes) and sprayed in digital scratches, with consequent imperfect movies in the most deliberate way. The rest of the filters seems a little flat to comparison, although the monochromatic approach can evoke its incisive charm in the right lighting.

The use of the CS-8 is pleasantly physical: lighting it by sliding a dial, press the eye on the tire cut in rubber and squeeze the trigger to be recorded. There is no concentration to worry about here. The 8x zoom is managed with “W” and “T” labeled buttons for large and telephoto lens, even if it is only digital, and the resolution drops rapidly when it goes too far away.