Despite the fact that smartphones have become impressively capable shooters, standalone point-and-shoot cameras are enjoying a renaissance. The tiny Kodak Charmera is still wildly popular, while influencers are scrambling to find aging Canon cameras on eBay. Godox, a company best known for its photography lighting products, is the latest to join the simple camera craze, but its new C100 stands out from the crowd by skipping a color preview screen for a transparent LCD that doubles as an optical viewfinder.
Although the C100 product page on Godox’s website is thin on technical details, including its sensor resolution and video capabilities, it shows off the camera’s viewfinder, which can display information like battery life and shooting settings. The device can even function as a light meter, measuring the brightness of what you’re framing and suggesting exposure settings that can be used on another camera.
The 65-gram camera can capture images and videos in four different aspect ratios, including 16:9 and 1:1, which are all stored on a microSD card up to 128GB in size. There’s no wireless connectivity, but you can transfer images to a PC or mobile devices over USB-C. The Godox C100 has launched in China but there’s no news on if it will ever see an international release. There’s no pricing info on its product page, either, but according to Digital Camera World the C100 is just ¥199, or around $29, making it even cheaper than the Charmera.