A Full Spectrum Conversion That Went Wrong, Or: How I Killed A Kodak Charmera

A Full Spectrum Conversion That Went Wrong, Or: How I  Killed A Kodak Charmera

Unusually, I'm going to start this post off with a disclaimer and a warning. If you try to follow these guidelines to make a Charmera full-spectrum and kill the camera, like I did, it's not my fault. This was my experience and it kind of worked, and then it didn't. Also, and I'll get this out at the start: always  make sure that the microSD card is removed from the camera. In this post I suggest using sharp blades in several (well two) places, so please, please take care when attempting this. I don't want to read in any comments about cuts, and missing fingertips, or worse. Take care of yourselves, and if you find a better way of disassembling the Charmera that doesn't involve blades, please let me know. Thank you. 

A couple of weeks ago, in December of 2025, I picked up a Kodak Charmera, a small 'keychain' camera. In fact, I have three Charmeras now; my original 'rainbows and stars' design, which is a normal unmodified version, and two others, which have remained in their boxes. This post is about the second Charmera, which I was hoping would be used for a full-spectrum conversion.

As a reminder, the Charmera is a small, no tiny, digital camera with a 1.6MP sensor and a tiny LCD screen. The controls are minimal, an on/off button, which also doubles as a menu selector, the shutter button, and three buttons on the back. One for playback/select items and two toggle buttons that cycle through the different filters. The shutter speed is fixed at around 1/30s, and images are stored on a microSD card. On the bottom of the device, next to the microSD card slot, is a USB-C socket for charging the camera or transferring files.  There are six different designs of the Charmera, with a seventh transparent design as a 'special', and they're sold in 'blind' boxes, so you don't actually know which one you've got until you open the box.

One thing I wondered with the original Charmera, as I do with all my cameras, was about it's infrared sensitivity. With a 720nm infrared filter held over the lens I got a lovely result, and with red, green, and blue filters, made some nice digital aerochromes and trichromes. So I was certainly encouraged going into this experiment. In this case, I'm hoping to open up the Charmera and remove the IR cut filter in front of the sensor to make it truly full-spectrum. In this condition, the sensor will be sensitive to all wavelengths of light, from ultraviolet to infrared, and with 720nm and (a newly acquired) 590nm filters, I hope I might get some interesting results. 

Opening the blind box revealed that I had the 'Kodak red' version of the Charmera, which seemed appropriate considering what I wanted to do with it. Looking at the sealed camera, I wondered how I might get into it, but from a previous test with my original Charmera I knew that with a fine blade I could prise the back off the camera. You have to be really careful, and not press too hard with the blade. Once the back starts to come off, you can separate the back from the camera, it's just held together with clips. One thing: if you've previously used the Charmera, make sure that you take out the microSD card. This will stop the main board from being removed from the body, and I think this is where I went wrong later.

Don't pull the back away from the camera, the LCD screen is connected to the main board with a thin ribbon wire, and you don't want the break that. I've seen videos where the user has opened the tab connecting the ribbon wire to the main board and separated the LCD screen completely, but you don't have to do that, so long as you are careful. Lift the battery off the main board, this is held on with double sided tape, and gently pull out the speaker. Be very careful with this, the wires are very thin. I found it best to tug gently on the wires until the speaker is partially removed and then pull it completely out with tweezers.

The next stage is to remove the main board. The is fixed to the body with two tiny screws. (Remember to check that you've removed the microSD card.) When these are removed keep them safe, don't lose them. The whole circuit board should fall out leaving two parts, the LCD back, with circuit board, speaker, and battery attached, and the now empty front of the camera. The sensor and lens assembly is connected to the front of the board with another ribbon wire, and this just pops into a mount in the front of the camera.

To get to the IR cut filter you need to pry the lens from the sensor. I was lucky to have a fine-blade medical scalpel, but a small X-acto (box cutter) should do to trick. Again, this seems to be lightly glued together, but once the two parts are partially separated, it's easy to pull apart. This should reveal the small sensor on one side, and the lens and cut filter on the other. You can't miss the IR cut filter, it's the circular glass, and reflects light with a lovely pink hue. I tried to get this out in one piece with my blade, but it's so thin that it just broke, so I just dug it out as best as I could. Underneath you can see the lens, and all you need to do is squeeze the two parts back together. I think that the foam padding on the back of the sensor holds the lens assembly securely in place when the main board is reattached, so you shouldn't have to glue it together. As you'll see shortly, it might be better not to glue the lens to the sensor in case adjustments have to be made.

Reassembling the Charmera is then just a matter of positioning the lens assembly in its socket, reattaching the main board with the two screws, and putting the speaker and battery back in place. Once all this is done, the camera back can be clipped back into place. Now it's time to power up and test your nice new full-spectrum Charmera.

And this is where everything came slightly unstuck for me. Up close, the view through the LCD screen looked great, with all of the images having a lovely pink tinge. I took the camera to the window, and although the sun had set, the image looked like a full-spectrum image. I took an image of the view, and transferred it to the phone. It was blurred. It's a known fact that infrared wavelengths have a slightly different point of focus to visible wavelengths, and the IR cut filter has a small refractive index that the manufacturers adjust for when making digital cameras. I was hoping that the cut filter of the Charmera was thin enough that this would not have been important, but it seems like it is.

I reopened the Charmera and started to take it apart, which was going perfectly well until I tried to remove the main board from the body. It just wouldn't come out. And then I remembered the microSD card, which was still sitting in the camera. When I removed that the board came out easily, but when I tried to power the disassembled camera to check focus, it was dead. The only thing I can think of was that I tried to pull the board out with the microSD card in place, and somewhere along the line I broke something. So now I have a dead red Charmera. It's a shame, I really liked that design. 

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