- Although mostly known for photo lighting equipment, Godox has announced a small ‘transparent viewfinder camera’ weighing only 65g.
- It has a transparent(ish) window for composition that doubles as a settings screen – and it can also act as a light meter.
- We don’t yet have information on key internal specs like sensor size and resolution (but you can expect them to be low).
Very cheap cameras are back in fashion these days, so I wasn’t necessarily surprised to see another one released – but I was surprised to see it coming from Godox.
The Godox C100 is a ‘transparent viewfinder camera’, advertised by the Chinese company, which until now has been better known for producing the kind of high-end lighting equipment you’d find in professional photographers’ studios, as well as more affordable flashguns. But with an advertised price of just ¥199 (equivalent to around $29 / £22 / AU$42), the C100 is considerably more affordable than anything else on the Godox books.
As you can see, the C100 is built around a quite unusual form factor. A palm-sized rectangle, it doesn’t have an exact screen, but instead a transparent window that you use to compose your photos. This window is also capable of displaying key information such as exposure settings and battery life.
Now I said ‘unusual’ form factor, not ‘unique’. This is because, as a few people have already observed, the Godox C100 looks similar to a camera that debuted at CP+ in 2025, the Escura InstantSnap. The Godox version looks a bit more advanced and offers a few interesting features that the Escura version does not. But we can make a few inferences – the Escura camera produces images at a resolution of 1.3MP, and I’d be surprised if Godox offered much more than that.
The Godox C100 has a USB-C connection for charging and file transfer, and it accepts 128GB micro SD cards for storage. It also records video and can do so continuously for up to 1.5 hours and offers recording in a variety of aspect ratios: 16:9, 4:3, 3:2 and 1:1. There are a few physical buttons for recording and changing settings, and it weighs just 65g.
A handheld light meter
At first glance, the Godox C100 looks like another cheap novelty camera in a market that is starting to get saturated with them. However, there was one feature advertised that really caught my attention as I’m a keen cinematographer — the C100 can also function as a light meter.
Like any good handheld light meter, the Godox C100 can read the brightness levels in the central area of a scene and provide the optimal exposure settings to capture a balanced image. Once hugely invaluable tools, light meters have been rendered mostly completely redundant in the digital age. But anyone who habitually buys a bunch of old film SLRs will tell you that the metering system is always one of the first things to go. I have several beautiful Pentax SLRs in the drawer next to me that still shoot and wind up beautifully, but cannot meter a scene because the electronics are busy.
So the idea of a neat little device that can be used in my pocket only costs $29 that I can take anywhere and use to quickly measure a scene and maybe even use to take a few comparison photos for review along with my developed and scanned frames – that interests me.
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Granted, the meter functionality will only be of interest to a small percentage of users. But still, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Godox C100 is a huge hit if and when it eventually hits international retailers (it’s currently only announced in China). Small cameras have been big hits of late, most notably the keychain-sized Kodak Charmera, and screenless cameras that offer a cleaner, more immersive shooting experience have also seen success, the poster child for the movement being Camp Snap.
People like cute cameras. People like cheap cameras. And the Godox C100 is both! I’m sure when we get our hands on it for a review we’ll find that the image quality isn’t much of a shake – but did that stop the Kodak Charmera? No, it didn’t.
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