Why Gen Z is choosing old-school cameras over smartphones: It's more than just nostalgia

A couple of years ago, American summer camps began banning screens. No smartphones, no tablets, nothing with a display. A small company called Camp Snap spotted the gap and built a camera for those kids: a point-and-shoot with the look of a 1990s Kodak, just a viewfinder and a flash, with no way to see a photo until they plugged the camera into a computer. Then something the company had not planned for happened. “All of a sudden, out of nowhere, a lot of Gen Z, millennial demographic started buying them,” Camp Snap president Trevor George told NPR. “We realized very quickly that, OK, this is way beyond kids at summer camp.” The numbers are not a blip This is not a social media illusion. Canon told NPR that sales of its PowerShot, the point-and-shoot line it had all but written off, jumped nearly sevenfold between 2022 and 2025. Camp Snap says its own sales more than doubled in a single year. The industry-wide data says the same thing. According to shipment figures from CIPA, the Japanese association whose members include Canon, Sony, Nikon and Fujifilm, compact cameras grew 29.6% in 2025, to roughly 2.44 million units shipped worldwide. That helped push total camera shipments up for a second straight year, the first back-to-back rise in nearly two decades, in a market that had shrunk almost every year since 2017. A category the industry had declared dead is now its growth engine. The look is the point Anyone who lived through 2004 knows the aesthetic instantly: slightly grainy, a little fuzzy, blown out in the center by a merciless flash, often stamped with the date in red or orange. The result reads less like a document and more like a memory that has already aged. That is precisely the appeal for people who never shot on one the first time around. Katie Coyne, 24, from New York, bought a digicam for a safari trip and has since lent it to her younger sister Gwen, 22, in Philadelphia. Both describe the vintage blur as a relief after years of hyper-sharp phone photos. “I feel like iPhone cameras look just so, sometimes it looks a little too real,” Gwen told NPR. Jaden Williams, 16, from North Carolina, first picked one up in his yearbook class and found the photos felt more genuine. He asked for a camera for his birthday and now carries it alongside his phone, choosing between them by situation. Food goes on the phone. Friends and parties go on the camera, for what he calls a warmer vibe. A small rebellion against the phone For plenty of buyers, though, the aesthetic is secondary. The real draw is what the camera cannot do. Christina Berkett, 34, a wedding photographer from New Jersey, started carrying a point-and-shoot specifically to keep her phone in her bag. “I think you get caught up in the digital world, where, OK, I’m pulling out my phone to take a photo and then I see a notification or I’m checking my email,” she said. With a camera, the photos wait. You go through them at the end of the night and relive the evening instead of being pulled out of it. That instinct extends well past cameras. eBay told NPR it is seeing a surge of searches for iPods, CDs and Walkmans. Berkett’s own clients now pay extra for her to film their ceremonies on an old Camcorder, holding it loosely like a relative would, because they want the footage to feel like a home video rather than a production. There is one detail that gives the whole movement away. Berkett holds that camcorder turned on its side, so the video comes out vertical. Because everyone is still going to watch it on a phone. How long does it last? The most recent numbers suggest the surge is real but no longer accelerating. CIPA’s data for the first half of 2026 shows compact shipments up about 16% year over year, a strong figure that is nonetheless well down from the 30% pace the category held through 2025 and the opening months of this year. June was the first month to actually fall behind its 2025 equivalent. That is what makes this more interesting than a nostalgia cycle. Low-rise jeans came back and will leave again. But the people buying these cameras are not only chasing a look, they are buying a device defined by its limitations: no notifications, no instant review, no way to check anything. Whether that appetite outlasts the trend is the real question, and the answer will show up in the shipment data long before it shows up on TikTok. This article was constructed with the assistance of artificial intelligence and published by a member of The Washington Times' AI News Desk team. The contents of this report are based solely on The Washington Times' original reporting, wire services, and/or other sources cited within the report. For more information, please read our AI policy or contact Steve Fink, Director of Artificial Intelligence, at sfink@washingtontimes.com The Washington Times AI Ethics Newsroom Committee can be reached at aispotlight@washingtontimes.com.