i remember six or seven years ago thinking i was some kind of elite cheapskate for knowing about aliexpress, where you could pick up all sorts of "made in china" stuff at deep discounts by cutting out the middlemen and buying direct from chinese vendors and manufacturers. it had a lot of fun quirks, shipping was dirt cheap but the delivery times were on the order of months so things would often show up long after you'd forgotten about them or given up, and you had to shop around and carefully read reviews from brave pioneers buying untested products because they frequently didn't come as advertised.the most popular "hack" back then was using aliexpress to buy these xiaomi brand smartphones, which were alleged to be of comparable quality to the name-brand flagships at a fraction of the price. obviously there were a lot of cheap smartphone manufacturers, however people felt most comfortable with xiaomi because they had by far the strongest branding, which they accomplished by shamelessly ripping off apple for their entire brand identity. the thing is, to actually get one of those cheap xiaomi phones, you'd have to spend dozens of hours on research to find a reputable vendor selling a model compatible with american cellular networks, and then if it actually arrived, spend even more time replacing the operating system because everyone agreed that the default one sucked and probably came loaded with spyware.

i spent a long time browsing the site but rarely bought anything, and the stuff i did buy almost never costed more than $5. out of my handful of purchases, i got the most mileage out of this horribly fat "leather" accordion wallet that improbably survived seven years of daily use, and which i replaced not because it broke, but because i was sick of feeling like i was hauling around a miniature brick in my pocket all the time. another memorable purchase was the most expensive thing i ever bought from there, a 128gb "Kingdian" usb drive for $25, at the time a too-good-to-be- true price for that amount of storage. usually what would happen is that you'd plug one of them in and it would say it had 128gb of storage, though if you tried to write that much data to it you'd find that most would get sent to /dev/null on the sly. there were legends, though, that some of the drives were for real, including the kingdian one. indeed it was for real and i used it for many years until i lost it, however getting it fully functional took some work. i followed some dodgy guides online and in the process somehow managed to disable every usb port on my computer by irretrievably deleting the drivers, which required a full operating system reset to fix that i pulled off only because i had an old IBM keyboard that used a PS/2 port. i finally got the usb working using a different guide that showed you how to flash a new version of the usb firmware using the original chinese program they use in the factory. the only issue was that the program only ran in windows xp, luckily old IBM hardware came to the rescue yet again in the form of my ancient thinkpad, which i used to bring to school to play 3D Pinball for Windows - Space Cadet during class. good times.

anyways, since those halcyon days it seems that buying cheap chinese crap direct from the source has gone mainstream, thanks to new platforms like temu that market directly to americans. this year there were even a few temu ads during the super bowl, some of the country's most revered ad space. not only that, even the "reputable" marketplaces like amazon and ebay are starting to feel a bit like overpriced aliexpress, flooded by chinese vendors selling the same stuff at premium prices. of course, americans are still buying since they are the world's most adept consumers, especially at those rock-bottom prices. it's a new golden era for shopaholics like my brother, who buys so much stuff that he never looks at again after unboxing it. i don't get it at all, maybe it's all about the excitement of receiving a package, but the reason i'm excited for things coming in the mail is because i can't wait to actually use them. my brother, on the other hand, will often leave things on the floor right where he unwrapped them and never think about them again, unless i happen to mention it to him. that usually happens in the context of dealing with it somehow, whether by putting it away somewhere or reselling it or throwing it out, in which case suddenly it's his most precious treasure and how could i possibly even THINK of doing anything with it. it sounds to me like the exact mindset that hoarders have...

⊕in a rare "truth in advertising" moment, it looks pretty much identical to the promo photos i found onlinea few weeks ago, i left my room and found him outside unwrapping his latest purchase. he proudly showed it to me, "the world's cheapest DSLR" that he bought for $20 from temu "as a joke". i asked "a joke on who?" and he didn't reply, instead he insisted that i try holding it for a second. it was shockingly light for its size (only half a pound or so), like it was just a hollow plastic shell in the shape of a camera, used as a toy or a movie prop. the protruding cylindrical lens part was completely melded to the body, and i suspected it was only for show. on the lens cap where normally you might see a brand name, it just said "Camera", as if it's still trying to convince you. i'm not entirely sure it's a DSLR, but can't verify because i don't really know what a DSLR is in the first place, and when i tried to do some research about it on wikipedia i accidentally ended up reading about the olympus scandal for 30 minutes.

after taking in all the jank, i couldn't help but be a little curious: what do the photos from that thing look like? that question was still at the back of my mind several weeks later when a good opportunity presented itself. it was a nice sunny day, and a friend and i made plans to go on a little hike. leaving my room, the camera was still right where my brother had left it after unwrapping it that day, so i picked it up, loaded four AA batteries like ammunition, and went out for the hike.

at the trailhead, i pulled out the camera as we got out of the car and my friend remarked "oh, taking your fancy new camera for a spin?" either he was being sarcastic or hadn't gotten a good look at it (later i found out it was the latter). it's been a while since i've gone out for a photo shoot, i prefer to live in the moment and don't really have the patience to slow down and find good angles or take a lot of photos (a trick i learned from one of the best photographers i've met: if you just spam the shutter a couple photos are bound to come out good from dumb luck alone). part of it is also that i get overwhelmed by all the settings that cameras have these days, but luckily this camera made things easy by having almost no settings besides something called "EV". effort value? expected value?yeah i probably shouldn't be reviewing cameras, let alone taking pictures who knows... other than that, once you chose your mode (picture, video, and... audio?), you could get right to it. the light weight of the camera was also a big plus, it didn't have a neck strap but i never got tired of carrying it around in my hand because it felt practically weightless.

getting back from the hike, i rushed to a computer to see the results of my experiment. i had no idea what to expect, since the screen quality on the camera was highly questionable (that same screen also served as the only viewfinder).

the first few pictures were closeups of some interesting flowers i saw (not really sure what they are). the quality is about as bad as you’d expect, on par with the DSi camera maybe, but nothing really remarkable, certainly not anything i'd bother making a blog post over. when i took some longer-distance shots, though, is when things really went off the rails.

i chuckled a bit when i first saw this one, this was taken from middle-distance at best and the quality is already atrocious. but there's something a little bit odd about it too, a hint of what's to come...

ah yes, a wonderful picture of bright sunshine falling on the waterfall and completely overwhelming the camera's lens... wait, WHAT is going on with the foliage???

i haven't edited these at all besides reducing the size, each one was originally 1mb and 4032 x 2520 ("4k"?). this is exactly how they popped out of the camera. it's extraordinary, one of my friends said it's an excellent recreation of psychedelic visuals. i have no idea what's going on, it's almost as if every photo is passing through some weird acid trip filter, or maybe the forest and bright sun was just too much for it...

the final photo was this masterpiece below, i was originally baffled by it until i remembered that i had tried to take a vertical photo of some trees with their reflections in still water. of course, the camera didn't flip the photo, so combined with the camera's trippy foliage effects it ended up looking like one of those "magic eye" pictures. if you rotate your head to the right you might be able to make out what's going on, there's a bit of sky poking out in the bottom left corner.

it's also fascinating upside-down, to me it looks like there's a dog-faced angel spreading its glowing wings on the upper right:

⊕although the photos are by no means "clear clear", i will grant them that it's a "different experience"my final verdict: with its light weight and lack of confusing features/settings, i suppose it could be a good children's toy, as long as they're ok with being limited to taking pictures of another dimension. but otherwise, in an era where even budget smartphones come with passable cameras, does anybody really think they can do better buying the cheapest crap chinese camera? i mean, for the same price or less, you could also go onto ebay and pick up a used digital camera from 10-15 years ago that will effortlessly capture clear, legible photos, the bare minimum which this camera wasn't even able to achieve. i don't know, maybe some people are addicted to that feeling of "newphoria"...