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I was looking for a digital toy camera, you know, something pocketable and simple. I wanted a fixed lens, no screen, no sharpening, no compression artifacts, and ideally, no auto-exposure.
Turns out, that doesn’t really exist.
So I dug out an old Samsung TL500 I bought about 15 years ago and turned it into one.
I skinned it in colorful vinyl so it doesn’t feel like a “serious” camera. Then I locked the zoom lens at 24mm. I set the focus to manual and locked it at 6 feet. The exposure is set to manual, ISO 80, shutter fixed at 1/350. Sharpening off, JPEG fine (no visible compression artifacts). I flipped the screen inward, basically disabling it. Lastly, I added a shoe-mounted viewfinder and inserted a twenty-year old 100MB SD card.
I’ve been carrying it everywhere and shooting using a rough "Sunny 16" approach. It’s basically a stripped-down digital camera where I have to guess exposure and live with the result.
The files are clean (no baked-in sharpening, no weird processing) and the experience feels closer to shooting an old film camera than anything modern.