Polaroid Digital 320
Oct 16 '00 (Updated Oct 26 '00)
On a whim, I picked up this, the most inexpensive digital camera I could possibly find, at K-Mart no less! I have been having so much fun with this camera that I thought it would be a good idea to write a review on it. It will probably turn out to be a stupid idea, but let's try it and see first, shall we? Yes! We shall see!
The Good Bits
It cost me sixty dollars. That's a very good bit, to tell you the utter truth of it all. I've seen cameras from $400.00 and up, so the price makes me very happy indeed.
It can hold up to 63 pictures of 24-bit quality, which is, if you don't mind me saying, pretty fargin' good! Of course, those expensive ones can take 32-bit pics, but I have a friend whose cam was $350.00 and it takes 32-bit ones, but only holds 34 pics. Anyway...
The pictures are actually of pretty good quality, and if you are careful with your lighting for things like close-up pictures and such, then you won't need a more expensive cam for things like that. The pictures I've taken of things from a distance are pretty nice too, so the trick with this one is just to get a good solid lighting level.
The transference of the pictures from the camera to the computer is incredibly simple. Just pop the CD in and install, then hook the cable into the camera, then whatever port in the back into which it fits, and tell it what to do when you get the program running. I had removed the stuff from the package, taken my first few pictures and had them in my computer, ready to view, in about ten minutes.
It's got a neato timer, which is perfect for those pics of you sitting under a tree from fifty yards away with your claymore carefully positioned over your shoulder, a winning, boyish smile on your face.
The Bad Bits
You have to be a bit careful about lighting when indoors. The quality isn't quite as good as "photo quality," so if you're really out for the cream of the crop, this is neither here nor there, so look toward more expensive models.
You can't see your pictures, or erase them from the camera's memory, until you hook it up to your computer. This can be frustrating at times, when you're wondering if that last picture looked right or not.
The Pink Bits
Well, I guess you can take nude pics with it. *shrug*
In Closing
This is a good camera for "hey, give me a sec and I'll show you a pic of my friend Gertrude who just came over"-type situations (it's a new situational niche I have decided to carve out) and taking impromptu pictures of people and things. It is also a good camera for people who are only moderately interested in digital photography, so people who aren't crazy about dishing out hundreds of dollars can still get their pics in their computer without having to have them developed and then hooking up a stupid printer.
UPDATE!
I noticed that some other reviewers' reviews of this camera yielded different facts from mine in regards to how many pictures the camera can hold at one time. I have determined, after having it hold up to 63, 24, 36, and a mere 11 pictures at once, that it holds a number of pictures depending upon the graphic complexity of said pictures. Let me break it down for you: It can hold 63 pictures (maybe more, I don't know for sure if that's the cap) of you, a pale white person, sitting in a well-lit area with nothing but a white wall behind you, if that's the only sort of thing you take with it; on the other end of the extreme, I only had 11 pictures when I came home from shooting pictures of several multi-colored trees (you know how varied all the shades are when some leaves are green, some yellow, some orange, some red, etc. in Autumn). I then compared the file size of those pics with other more simplistic ones I had taken...BINGO! The ones with all the colors make the camera work harder to get them all in as well as possible...so it takes up more space, and thusly, lower number of pictures. I think I could probably take about 75 or so pictures of a plain white sheet of paper under a halogen light..I don't know for sure. Anyway, the really colorful pictures that I have taken so far have file sizes up to 22k, whereas those of just me in my room near a lamp were as small as 8k. I hope this helps clear up the mystery a bit.
Oh, if you want to see some pics that I've taken with this camera, go to the following URL:
http://community.webshots.com/user/therealbathtimefriend
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Epinions.com ID:
BathtimeFriend
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Member: Spike Gogo Thrasher
Location: Henderson, TN
Reviews written: 41
Trusted by: 35 members
About Me:
I like food.
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