As a toy for user-generated content, it can be used to shoot grayscale photographs, edit them or create original drawings, and transfer images between GBC units or to the 64DD art game suite Mario Artist.

Both the camera and the printer were marketed by Nintendo as light-hearted entertainment devices aimed mainly at children in all three major video game regions of the world: Japan, North America, and Europe.

The Game Boy Camera line has five different standard colors of models: blue, green, red, yellow, and clear purple (Japan only).

There is a limited edition gold themed for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, which contains unique stamps, and was available only in the United States through a mail-order offer from Nintendo Power.

Individual photographs can be taken and edited with features including a delay timer, time lapse, trick lenses like mirroring and scaling, montage, and panorama for stitching together component photos into one large image.

[6] Third-party vendors have reverse engineered the GBC system to create modern transfer methods such as USB, SD cards and Wi-Fi.

[13] The camera's built-in software was co-developed by Nintendo Research & Development 1 and the Japanese company Jupiter, with Tanaka directing the project.

[19] An artist using a Game Boy Camera and three colour process has developed a series of works since 2012, focussing on how the interplay between what the abstracted images reveal and conceal about the photographed environment.