The other day I sat at a table with executives and marketing directors for a camera company. We spoke about the compact camera market, its direction, and how good a choice the Sichuan food was that we were enjoying. Then I slip something out of my pocket that instantly attracts their curiosity. It’s the Escura camera. They agree – it’s never anything that they could make profitable. And of anything that I’ve used this year, the Escura camera is one of the most curious-looking digicams yet. At the same time, it speaks to the soul of a Chris Gampat back in my high school days.
This thing is adorable. It’s got 1.3 megapixels, doesn’t look like a traditional camera at all and has various modes. Slide 1 is normal. Slide 2 is Polaroid style. Slide 3 is for video.
The images from the Escura camera remind me of the old Nokia flip phones when cameras first became available in phones. It was only a bit after 9/11 that the cameras started to become more technologically advanced. And I really remember being in high school and watching my rich friend flip the camera on his phone back and forth.
In various ways, I’m embracing this. At 38 years old, I’m seeing the world kind of in an odd time loop from the early 2000s. We’ve got a President who wants to f-around and find out around the world. I’m pushing my fitness regimen even further the way I did back then. I’m even writing poetry again in a way that I haven’t done in years. Just the other night, I met a man in a bar who knows the woman I’d call my favorite high school girlfriend. Oh, and I picked the bass guitar back up.
Where my predecessors have called this mid-life crisis, I embrace it as mid-life Renaissance.
In fact, I had to do something kind of crazy for this review. I’m one of the first classes of people to have used Facebook. Originally, it was available just for college students. And on there, I’ve got so many old photos of myself from the days where phones like that were big. I pulled them specifically for this review to compare.
The following photographs are from my old phones back in high school and early college days. That’s between 2001 and 2007.
The Escura camera has a similar aesthetic, but it’s actually still better than my phone in high school was. In college (I entered in 2005) I got a better camera. It was only in the late 2000s that I started to get better phones. And it wasn’t until maybe around 2011 when I got my first real smartphone.
In every way, the Escura camera emulates exactly what we had in high school. That’s a very nice way of saying that it kind of sucks. But at the same time, it has a charm to it.
Despite all of this, I can’t fall in love with the Escura camera. It’s missing a lot of the charm and excitement that vintage cameraphones had. For example, the flip interface really put you into the mindset that you were going to shoot and image and frame it with the little LCD screen. You also had to press very specific buttons on it to make the camera fire. When you were done, you could go to an image gallery on the phone and look at the photos you shot.
Those phones, at the time, were very much embracing the future. The Escura camera, on the other hand, it trying to get you away from screens. Yet even when using the framing system, I feel that it’s off in so many ways.
I bought the Escura camera after we originally reported on it. And honestly, I kind of regret buying it.
