IKEA Knäppa PS2012 (2012)

To promote their PS2012 line of furniture and to find out how customers lived in their own four walls, IKEA teamed up with Jesper Kouthoofd and in collaboration with Stockholm’s Teenage Engineering designed a re-usable cardboard camera. The camera was disclosed to the public during the Salone del Mobile in April, 2012. Since it was launched in april many thought of it as an April Fool's gag. The camera design was simple, instead of a viewfinder there was a hole in the cardboard and via a pinhole in the front one could erase all images by using a paperclip. It also had an integrated USB connector so you could download your images.

The entire camera body was made out of one piece of folded cardboard, only secured by two plastic screws. A small circuit board held all the electronics and the (CMOS?) imaging sensor. The camera itself could not be bought in stores but was raffled off among the first 150 who would upload an image of their own "way of living" to the Hej-community website. Other sources state that the camera was given away to anyone who bought a piece of furniture of the new PS2012 collection. Anywho, the total number of distributed Knäppa's remains a mystery...

IKEA dubbed this gadget "the world's cheapest digital camera" as well as being totally recyclable..