About Camera Roulette

What this is

Camera Roulette is a hand-maintained reference site cataloguing 147+ vintage point-and-shoot film cameras from the 1970s through the early 2000s. Every camera has its own profile page with specifications, an editorial note on what it's like to shoot today, and a short history. A randomiser on the home page picks one for you when you can't decide what to put in your bag.

The catalogue focuses on consumer compacts — the cameras most people actually owned, lost in moves, and are now rediscovering on shelves at their parents' houses. We deliberately stay out of the SLR and Leica corners of the internet; they're already well documented.

Who runs it

Camera Roulette is run by a photographer and camera afiicionado based in Europe. We are not a shop; we don't sell cameras, repair cameras, or develop film. We write about them, photograph them, and keep the catalogue up to date when we discover new entries or fix existing ones.

How cameras are selected

Cameras are included based on three criteria: historical relevance (the landmark designs of each decade), practical interest (cameras you can still find and shoot today), and personal hands-on testing or first-hand reports from users we trust. Specifications are cross-referenced against the Camera-Wiki. Mistakes do creep in — if you spot one, tell us.

Editorial standards

We do not republish manufacturer marketing copy, and we don't write puff pieces in exchange for affiliate clicks. When a camera has a famous quirk — mercury batteries, a noisy motor, a meter that's usually dead — we say so plainly, even when it might cost us a click.

Camera images on detail pages are either our own photographs, licensed from their original photographers (credited and linked on the page), or pulled from Wikimedia Commons / Flickr under their original Creative Commons licence. If you are the rights holder for a photo and want it changed, credited differently, or removed, please contact us and we'll act on it within a few days.

Affiliate & advertising policy

Camera Roulette participates in the eBay Partner Network: when you click through to eBay from one of our pages and complete a qualifying purchase, we earn a small commission. The price you pay is unchanged. We use these links because eBay is genuinely where most vintage point-and-shoot cameras are bought today; the commission keeps the site running and the catalogue expanding.

The site might also display Google AdSense advertising and use Google Analytics for aggregate audience measurement. None of this changes what we write or which cameras we feature. Our editorial picks and the affiliate links are two separate things, and we keep them that way.

For full details of what is loaded, what cookies are set and how to opt out, see our privacy & cookies page.

Get in touch

Corrections, suggestions, image-credit fixes, takedown requests, or just a good camera story — please write in via the contact page. We read everything, though we can't always reply individually.