I've been following this Kickstarter since it launched, which is its own kind of slow-motion commitment — the sort where you watch a project accrue updates and stretch goals for so long that by the time it ships you've forgotten what convinced you in the first place. I pulled the trigger at four in the morning, half asleep, in that specific window where a purchase feels less like a decision and more like something that happens to you. I remember thinking, almost immediately after, that I'd done something dumb. That feeling didn't fully go away; it just got quieter.
What followed was the modern pre-order experience in miniature: downloading the companion app before there was anything to pair it with, joining the Discord, and finding a community already mid-argument. Some of it was garden-variety impatience, some of it was people who'd clearly been burned by crowdfunded hardware before and were bracing for it again. I sat with that ambient frustration for a while without much to show for my own money except a countdown. In the meantime I did the thing you do when you're waiting on gear instead of using it — I developed film recipes and tested them on whatever pictures were lying around, building a little library of settings for a camera I didn't have yet.
Then it arrived, courtesy of Evri, in a box that had clearly had a longer journey than the tracking number suggested. Banged up, but intact, which is about the ceiling of what you can ask from that courier. First impression was good — better than the online noise had prepared me for — with the one immediate oddity being the absence of a basic cap in the box, which feels like the kind of omission that saves a few cents per unit and costs a proportionally larger amount of goodwill.
Firmware update went fine, technically, though "fine" came with an asterisk: it didn't apply until I unplugged and replugged the USB-C myself, no automatic restart prompting me through it. Getting a card ready was its own small errand — I used a SanDisk Extreme, and since Windows refuses to format anything over 32GB as FAT32, I had to go through Rufus to get there. Nothing difficult, just a reminder that this is still a product with rough edges in the setup path, not just the shooting experience.
The shutter button was the first physical surprise. There's a loud clack to it, loud enough that on the first few presses indoors I half expected something to have actually broken. I'm hoping it reads as less alarming outside, away from walls that turn everything into an echo chamber. I already added a bit of foam after opening up the camera as suggested by other users but the difference is basically null -
The workflow around getting images off the thing is its own adjustment: it doesn't hold a wifi connection while you're shooting, and because it's wifi rather than Bluetooth, pulling photos means disconnecting my phone from my home network every single time. I also haven't found a way to preview a roll's thirty-six exposures fullscreen without first moving them into the gallery, which might be a gap in my understanding of the app rather than a genuine limitation, but either way it's friction.
And then there's the stuff that isn't a mystery, because it's the stuff people online had already flagged before mine even shipped. Under thirty shots in, I've had three misfires while winding, a viewfinder inaccurate enough that I've mostly stopped trusting it, and focus that's soft in a way I'm choosing to describe generously. There's also a real gap between pressing the shutter and the green confirmation light, more than I'd chalk up to my own reflexes. None of this is a surprise, exactly — I went in with expectations calibrated by other people's early units — but there's a difference between reading about a problem and winding into your fourth misfire of the evening.
The good part, unambiguously, is the community — watching other people work through the same app quirks and firmware growing pains in real time, comparing notes, occasionally commiserating. The bad part is that the thing currently feels half-assed, in the specific way that products do when the hardware shipped slightly ahead of the software and the documentation both. It's easy for me to say that with some distance and a functioning sense of humor about it; less so, I'd guess, for the backers who've been more patient than the timeline deserved. I'm only a few hours and thirty exposures into a relationship I plan on having for a while, so I'll withhold the real verdict. For now: it clacks, it misfires, and I already know I'm going to keep shooting it anyway.
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