In February 1987, Japanese film producer Fujifilm stood poised to produce a gamechanger in consumer camera technology: the first mass-market disposable camera.
The Quick Snap disposable, released in Japan in 1986, had given Fujifilm a head start in what would become a hugely popular market. It was prepared to announce a global release at a major US photo industry trade show run by the Photo Marketing Association.
Their biggest rival, America’s Eastman Kodak, had learned that Fujifilm had increased their production from one million units to between three and four million – making them believe that this extra production was destined for the US market.
But Kodak had a spoiler up their sleeves.
“Eastman Kodak Co. plans to sell a $6.95 disposable camera called the Fling later this year,” wrote news agency UPI on 19 February – just days before the Quick Snap was to be unveiled to a global audience.
However, a few paragraphs down there was an important detail: the Fling wouldn’t be loaded with 35mm film but the much smaller 110 film.
“It will appeal to young people, to travelers [sic] who have left their camera home, and to those who suddenly find themselves with an unexpected daylight photo opportunity,” Peter Palermo, a Kodak manager of consumer products, told UPI at the time.
Kodak announced the Fling even though it wasn’t yet a physical product, but it did indeed reach shelves later that year. The Fling was no bigger than a carton of 110 film, a simple plastic body encased in a cardboard sleeve. It was small enough to pop in the tightest pocket – but there was a major drawback. The smaller film format meant it was harder to make big prints from the negatives.
Kodak made the Fling for only two years, and in 1989 dropped it in favour of a 35mm follow-up. The big-budget battle of the disposables Kodak would fight with Fujifilm would, from then on, remain a 35mm affair. (Perhaps stung by the rising resistance to disposable consumer items, Kodak renamed their single-use camera from “Fling” to “Fun Saver”.) Disposable cameras, from both Kodak and Fujifilm, still live on four decades later, with a new generation of photographer discovering their care-free charms.
The Fling – a use-once-then-discard camera, quickly faded from memory. But nearly 40 years after its surprise appearance, it has been reborn as the must-have digital camera of 2025.
The Kodak Charmera is an ultra-small digital camera produced by Hong Kong-based photographic brand Reto, the company behind other successes as the Kodak Ektar H35N half-frame simple camera and the reborn Ultra Wide & Slim camera.
The camera, announced on 9 September, is small enough to attack to a key-ring and sports a 1.6MP 1/4inch sensor. But it takes both photos and videos, and has a number of filters which can be added to images. One of them even mimics film borders.
The Charmera combined diminutive size with exclusivity; Reto jumped on the “blind box craze” by offering seven different designs, with customers not knowing which one they had bought until they opened the box. One of them – a clear model which allows you to see the camera’s inner workings – was a secret until launch.
Released in limited batches, the £30 camera has been an instant hit, with stores across the world running out of inventory almost as soon as they’ve been put on the shelves.
One of the Charmera’s editions, sporting bright yellow livery, features a prominent “1987” on its packaging – the year the Kodak Fling was released. As Reto’s Vivienne Tsang told Kosmo Foto, this was no accident.
“Yes, the design of the Kodak Charmera was inspired by the Kodak Fling, the brand’s first-ever single-use camera in the ’80s. We’d like to revive its spirit in a new, collectible format and launched it as a blind box product, just as blind boxes were becoming a cultural phenomenon,” she says.
“The Fling, with its 110 format and small size, was a symbol of Kodak’s legacy in making photography joyful and accessible to the public. We’d also like to highlight the portability of our keychain digicam and make them fun to use as well.”
The Charmera shows how a knowing nod to earlier designs can pay dividends. The Charmera doesn’t have to boast incredible specs because its market isn’t pixel-peeping gear heads. A usable digital camera can these days be as small as a 110 roll of film so why not pay homage?
At the very least, it puts a spotlight back on Kodak’s first eccentric disposable – an intriguing footnote in the US film giant’s storied history.
I'm a New Zealander who has been living in London since the mid-1990s, shooting film seriously since the year 2000. Kosmo Foto was launched in 2012 and has since become a film brand, with the release of my first films Kosmo Foto Mono 35mm (2017) and Kosmo Foto Mono 120 (2019).
I’m doing everything I can to promote film photography in the 21st Century, and help it survive and thrive. If you want to write something for Kosmo Foto, please drop me a line at foto.dowling@gmail.com.
