Hori Piranha Plant Camera

Hardware Type: Camera

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Review:

When the Nintendo Switch 2 launched in 2025, one of the accessories that launched alongside it was the Nintendo Switch 2 Camera. To be clear, Nintendo has announced that most USB-C cameras should work with the Nintendo Switch 2, but this camera was Nintendo’s official product, a 1080p USB-C camera.

However, just a week after the Nintendo Switch launched, we received another camera, the first officially-licensed Nintendo Switch 2 accessory, the Hori Piranha Plant Camera. It would be a little pricier at $60, and boast a lower image resolution, purportedly 640×480, well under the 480p standard. However, it would seek to make up for this by including some other nice features, and by being styled after one of Nintendo’s iconic characters.

I feel like we can’t really talk about this camera without talking about how Nintendo Switch 2 uses the camera, because it’s frankly not very much. Players can use this camera when playing using Game Chat with friends, and… not much else. There is a section of Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour that uses the camera, and the upcoming Super Mario Party Jamboree + Jamboree TV – Nintendo Switch 2 Edition will use camera input for some minigames, but otherwise it’s just going to sit there, collecting dust. Players cannot use this camera to take pictures or record video on their Nintendo Switch, though I suppose you could do so on a PC or other device, since this is just a USB-C camera.

This camera comes attached to a green warp pipe base that isn’t especially tall, but can be used to allow the piranha plant to stand up free from the Nintendo Switch 2 via the attached USB-C cable. Alternately, it comes with a clamp that can be used to attach it to the top of a TV or monitor. Or if you prefer, you can even attach the Piranha Plant directly into the USB-C port of your Nintendo Switch 2, skipping the pipe portion of the device directly. In either case, the USB-C port on your Nintendo Switch 2 is used both to transmit the camera signal and power the camera.

In addition, the plant itself can be posed more or less any way you like, and its hinged upper-mouth piece can be closed to act as a lens cover for those concerned about privacy. And just to ensure that it’s not getting in the way of your Nintendo Switch 2’s other features, it even comes with an extension cable for your headphone jack going out at a right angle from your Nintendo Switch 2.

At this point, you might be thinking that these extra features will give this camera a lot of flexibility and utility that Nintendo’s own camera lacks, and you would be right. However, don’t take that to mean that you’re getting value here…

This is a sample image taken with the Nintendo Switch 2 camera. Now, just to be clear, I couldn’t screen grab this image directly off of my Nintendo Switch 2, I had to take a photo of the screen, but I assure you, it isn’t the image quality of my photo that’s making it look this bad. Seeing this low image quality, I felt like I had just been sent back decades in time, to when webcams were only just first starting to be made available to average consumers, when this was what you could expect from the lowest of low-end webcams.

Hori advertises that this camera has a 30FPS frame rate, but I can say from my own tests that this was patently false – try anywhere between 1FPS and 0.20FPS. And just to make sure I’m fully-understood, that means that there were times when five full seconds passed between one frame and the next. I counted.

To say I was stunned by the poor image quality and framerate of this camera is an understatement – I was absolutely disgusted that a product like this is being sold for $60 in 2025, at a time when I could get a similar non-branded USB-C camera for $20-$30 that would far surpass this in quality. In fact, since the Nintendo Switch 2 isn’t terribly picky about the USB-C camera it uses, you can and should do exactly that, if you want to use a camera at all.

And if your attraction to this product is because you like the character… just get a piranha plant toy. It’ll likely cost you less, and you can put the money you save toward an actual decent camera instead. Heck, Nintendo themselves even sells a bunch of these toys.

I am still highly critical of the camera functionality on Nintendo Switch 2, and I still think Nintendo’s own camera is pretty terrible. But next to this piece of absolute trash, that camera looks like a piece of precision professional equipment. It’s not, it’s crap too. But at least it’s $5 and has a somewhat better image and framerate. I strongly recommend that you wait on getting a camera for your Nintendo Switch 2 until you actually need one, and when you do I strongly recommend getting an unbranded camera from some other company. And if you insist on getting an official Nintendo camera, then at the very least get Nintendo’s own product. But under no circumstances should you buy this horrendous waste of $60.

tl;dr – Hori Piranha Plant Camera for Nintendo Switch 2 boasts a good number of features and an adorable look, but this hardly matters when the image quality and framerate is absolute garbage. Do not waste $60 on this complete rip-off of a camera.

Grade: D-

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