Is this screen-free digi camera the secret to more mindful memory-making?

Like the vast majority of people who have smartphones, I am addicted to mine. I usually pick it up around 100 to 150 times per day, according to my iPhone’s recent Screentime stats. 

When I’m traveling, I usually try to keep my phone on airplane mode or in a special ‘focus’ mode I’ve created so that only travel-related notifications get through, like directions, messages from my Airbnb host, or weather alerts. But even still, my phone camera often acts as a gateway to checking other time-sucking apps.

For the last two months, I’ve been testing out a potential solution to this problem: The Camp Snap camera (USD$65). Billed as a digital ‘disposable’ camera, it looks and feels almost exactly like the disposable cameras that were ubiquitous in the ‘90s. Like a disposable camera, there’s no way to fuss over what the photos look like. You can’t change the lens or fiddle with shutter speed, aperture, or digital zoom.

Unlike a disposable camera though, you can take virtually limitless photos over the span of a day. There’s a digital ticker so you can see how many photos you’ve taken, but there’s no screen to see what those photos look like. And there are certainly no other apps through which you could become so distracted, you end up eliciting concern from well-meaning strangers who assume you must be dreadfully lost, as there is no other fathomable reason for you to be staring into your palm, with your back to the view, for so long.

No such distractions occurred when I used only the Camp Snap for a day of hiking around Kufstein, Austria, a few weeks ago.

I’m not here to tell you a Camp Snap will make you take ‘better’ photos. But I am here to tell you it will make you take more mindful photos, in a way that allows you to stay in the moment and capture feelings rather than polished poses.

After a full day of shooting hundreds of photos on the Camp Snap as the group paparazzo (aided by the flash sound effect the camera emits with every shot), I’m happy to say it did exactly what I had hoped it would do. As soon as my group reached the base of the chairlift that would take us to the trailhead, I turned off my phone, stuck it in my backpack, and refused to even use it to check the time. 

It was hard to resist taking a video from the single-seater Kaiserlift, which was one of the prettiest chairlift rides I’ve ever taken, but I’m glad I didn’t. Who are all those iPhone photos and videos for, anyway? Certainly not me—I don’t need 200 shots in pursuit of a perfect photo to remember how I felt in any given moment. I just need one. What I lost in fodder for Instagram Reels, I gained in prolific birdsong and feeling the sun sink into my skin after a long and dark winter.

I normally find it a hassle to transfer photos from my main camera, a Fuji, to my computer, but I felt no such resistance with the Camp Snap. Because you can’t see what you’ve taken until you plug in the camera and go through them on your computer, it feels sort-of like ‘developing’ the images, albeit much faster than driving to the old one-hour photo station in the pharmacy near my parents’ house, which sometimes took weeks to getting around to doing. Going through photos feels fun again with this camera, because there’s an element of surprise to it.

Technically speaking, the Camp Snap has an 8MP camera and shoots 35mm equivalent photos. However, I’m hesitant to judge the photo quality of the camera for two reasons. First, because it’s subjective. While a professional photographer certainly wouldn’t trade in their Nikon or Hasselblad to shoot exclusively on the Camp Snap, the photos are much better than I would have expected them to be. They’re better quality than an actual disposable, while still having an element of depth to them the way film cameras do. 

The second reason I’m hesitant to spend too much time talking about the image quality is because it feels kind-of counter to the whole point of using one. I’m not here to tell you a Camp Snap will make you take ‘better’ photos. But I am here to tell you it will make you take more mindful photos, in a way that allows you to stay in the moment and capture feelings rather than polished poses.

Aside from hiking in Austria, I’ve also taken the Camp Snap on a beach road trip around Mallorca, Spain, and used it frequently with friends around London, where I live. After using it in so many different contexts, there are a few things I wish were slightly different—though none of them are significant enough to dissuade me from using it. First, I wish you could turn off the sound effects. I suppose they make sense because there’s no haptic response to indicate you’ve triggered the shutter, but I don’t like them. I’ve found that pressing my thumb over the speaker dampens that sound fairly well. Second, I wish it had a wrist strap, or a place to put one. I drop things all the time, and I do not wish to lose this camera.

Finally, I wish it had a faux winding mechanism to mimic the feeling of advancing a roll of film after taking a photo. I know it’s a bit silly, but it’s also practical: You need to wait a couple of seconds in between shots while the images save to the camera, and it would be helpful to have a physical reminder of that. Often, I tried to take another photo too quickly and would have to reset my shot because the camera wasn’t quite ready yet.

At the end of my no-phone day in the Tyrolean Alps, I felt even more relaxed than I might have predicted. This vibe stuck around even when I reintegrated my Gmail app into my life later that evening. Even though I was on a work trip with a busy itinerary and little downtime to myself most mornings and evenings, I returned from the Alps feeling completely refreshed. It was almost as if there were extra hours of the day in Kufstein… hours that I had regained, perhaps, by casting aside phone distractions so successfully.

I will leave you with this: I am just old enough to remember a time when my family organized literal slide shows. I remember sitting in my aunt’s darkened living room as she projected film photos she’d taken in Nepal and passed around rupee notes left over from her trip. I don’t remember any specific images, but that wasn’t really the point. What mattered wasn’t the quality of her photos, but the fact that she had taken them, and that she knew the story behind each one. I looked at these photos of places I hadn’t yet learned about in school, and I knew I wanted to go there someday, too. 

Nearly 30 years later, it’s much harder to get people to sit still to look at travel photos. We can conjure professional images of basically anywhere in the world in a matter of seconds, so the bar for capturing our interest is much higher. Maybe it’s our short attention spans, or maybe it’s because travel photos have been cheapened by the iPhone and Instagram filters, which have made the everyman a photographer the same way Twitter and WordPress made the everyman a journalist.

If what you seek is a better way to connect with your travels while you’re on them, and a better way to convey the feelings of them when you return home, I think it’s hard to find a cleverer solution than the Camp Snap.

Camp Snap provided Adventure.com with a product sample but did not review or approve this article. Adventure.com receives no commission or commercial incentive for the publication of this review.

A note on sustainable consumerism: Adventure.com acknowledges that the most sustainable camera is the camera you already own (and the second-most sustainable one is best found in your local thrift store or flea market). While we don’t endorse buying things for the sake of it, we do try to highlight more sustainable options in our gear reviews so our readers can make more conscious and informed decisions.

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