Best Digital Cameras, Customer Reviews

Review by Sonya:

This was a gift for my 9 y/o nephew. We had previously bought the kids some of the one-time use cameras, but often never got around to getting the film developed. I thought it would be great to get my nephew and his sisters digital cameras so they could see pictures instantly and print via the computer. The girls (ages 6 and 7) got the inexpensive Vivitars, but I thought since he was older we would get him a slightly “better” camera. Boy was this a big disappointment.

First off, it has a little hole slot for a strap, but it doesn’t come with a strap! I looked everywhere for the Get Started manual, there wasn’t one. The screen is very small 1.5″, but you could still see the objects okay. The camera has some internal memory, which was about 25 photos. It did not come with an SD card, but we placed a 1GB SD in slot. The camera would turn on and show the “Loading” screen, but never got past that, even after 10 minutes. When you tried to turn off the power, the power button would not work. I had to remove the batteries while the SD card was in to get the camera to turn off. I changed the batteries thinking the supplied ones were old. Still the same problem. Basically, putting in the SD card made the camera inoperable.

Taking out the SD is incredibly difficult. There’s not a press and pop-out sort of function, you have to get a finger in and try to pull it out by grabbing the ridge in the SD card. I tried about 5 times and could never get it out. My husband had to remove it…terrible design. The SD card slot has a little rubber cover that looks like it may last a day or so before being pulled off. I was pretty P.O.’d. While the girls were snapping away, taking pictures with their 2GB SD cards installed, I was messing around with the Polaroid trying to get the card out. Unfortunately, since it was Christmas, I could not return it that day.

I decided to get the photos off the internal memory of camera and return it. I plugged the camera with supplied cable into the USB port, the camera would light up, but it never displayed on the computer as an input device. Inserted the CD that came with camera, thinking maybe you have to install the software first. Behold! The manual is on the software. The instructions on the CD said that once the cord and camera are plugged in, the device should show. It doesn’t. I have a MAC and a PC, it did not work on either one. There are instructions for copying photos from the internal memory to a card, but because I can’t get the camera to work when a card is actually inserted, I guess I am going to be out of luck. The photos he took looked liked some turned out okay, some were kind of grainy.

There is a digital zoom within the camera. My nephew kept looking for the optical zoom. I think the next one I try will be more upgraded because he seemed to really like it.

I would not recommend this camera to anyone, there are better inexpensive cameras out there.

Review by Sara Smith:

We received this 3.0 Megapixel camera as a gift for our 4 year old’s birthday. She wanted a camera, but the reviews on the cameras marketed specifically for kids didn’t look so great. This way she has her own camera so I don’t have to worry about her dropping my 0+ camera when she wants to take pictures. The display screen is adequate. It didn’t look like the flash was working at first so I had to take it into a dark closet to try it out, but then worked fine. There are 6 buttons on the back of the camera: MENU, MODE and one to move UP, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT as indicated by arrows which was easy for me and my child to figure out without reading the camera’s instruction booklet. This camera uses 2 AAA batteries and it eats batteries. We’ve had to replace them once a week and my child uses the camera every 2-3 days so we’ll look into getting rechargeable batteries. There’s a simple switch on the side to move from “Mountain” to “Flower” mode. USB plug in on the side. We used an SD 1GB card we had laying around and it works great. The cover for the SD compartment is rubber and just lifts away while being connected on one side so not too impressed with that. The color of the camera was true to monitor color which was great since my child loves purple. Did not come with a camera strap, but has a place to put one. Has a space on the bottom for tripod (not included).

Overall: Easy to use for both child and adult. I would recommend it for children rather than adults since I think it’s rather simple.

Review by Rick:

I purchased the Polaroid PoGo today and have done a fair bit of “playing” with this compact little printer over the past couple of hours. In fact, I have already used the first package of 10 sheets of Zink (Zero Ink) paper that come with the printer. So my first recommendation is; if you are planning on buying a PoGo, I highly recommend getting extra paper so you can get through your “testing” phase without having to purchase more paper. However, don’t go crazy and buy too much, there are expiration dates on the paper which may affect your picture quality if you take to long to “expose” (print) them.

Connectivity:

I have tested the Bluetooth capabilities with my Motorola Q, Laptop Computer (Bluetooth enabled), my desk-top Windows Vista computer (with Radio Shack “Bluespoon” Bluetooth 2.0 adaptor added) and my PictBridge capable Canon Powershot A 640 camera (directly connected to PoGo via USB cable) and the printer worked like a charm in all of the above tests!

Speed of Printing:

Print time is about 1 minute per photo. There was no noticeable change in print speed with any of the tests I performed. Using the Bluetooth (wireless) connection or plugging in your USB cable directly from your camera did not seem to make any difference as to how fast the image printed.

Image Quality:

Not great…but not the worst I have seen either…The pictures I printed from my camera (via USB connection) looked better than my pictures from my cell phone, but this was likely due to the higher megapixel image created by my camera versus the 1 megapixel image from my cell phone. However, the “white balance” of both my camera and cell phone images were a little “off”. The whites were extremely white (almost washed-out) and the dark (shadow areas) were very dark. So if you stay away from printing bright “beach / snow” images or dark “night” photographs you will be OK. Photos with lots of color (flowers, for example) looked pretty good when printed with the PoGo.

Cool things to do:

The adhesive on the back of the photo paper is a nice feature of this product. This makes it possible to add pictures to your hand written journals. You can stick them to business card magnets and put photos all over your refrigerator. You can make photo luggage tags, cards and much, much more.

If you don’t need the highest quality image, but want to do some fun, creative stuff with photographs I would definitely recommend the PoGo. If you are a photographer hoping that the PoGo would give you a quick “proof” of what your printed images will look like, then this printer is probably not for you, since the image quality is not as good as you could get with some standard ink jet printers.

Have fun…

Review by R. Frobenius:

This is a fun little printer mainly for on-the-spot prints. Kids especially like getting prints instantly. The Bluetooth connection works well, as does PictBridge via USB cable directly to camera. The unit is small enough to fit in a jacket pocket – you can take a picture of someone with your cell phone camera, send it to the printer wirelessly, and then magically hand them a print a few minutes later.

Now for the rough spots. While I really enjoy this printer, you should probably be aware of some hassles you may encounter (as I did). The battery life is not super-great – it’s rated at 15 pictures, but if it’s cold outside you may find the battery dead until you warm the unit up again. The metal case doesn’t help matters in this regard. You can bring the charger with you, but be aware that the charger is about as big as the unit itself – a minor annoyance.

Picture quality – there’s a reason the prints are so small. The quality is somewhat marginal, but usable. Most people are impressed that the thing exists in the first place and don’t scrutinize the prints that much, so the quality is generally good enough. I attended a wedding and started printing lots of prints for an on-the-spot scrapbook. The printer started streaking badly on the prints. There is a cleaning process you can run, but it became quite a time-consuming hassle. Not to mention the waste each time a print was unusable.

I still give it four stars because it’s a fun product and usually works well. The Bluetooth connection is a great feature for cell phone pics. Just be aware that you may have some occasional hassles.

Update: I’ve discovered that I get consistently very good looking results by keeping the special blue cleaning/calibrating sheet that comes with each pack. I run the sheet through before using the printer each day (if it hasn’t been used that day), and also after every three prints. The colors come out nice and rich, and no streaks!

Review by Peeved in Portland:

I will admit that I didn’t research this product thoroughly before I bought it. I wanted a cheap digital camera for my 1st grader and thought the kid cameras were too “babyish” looking for him. I thought he’d like the sleek blue grown-up look. And he did. But between opening it yesterday morning and when he went to bed, we changed the batteries 3 times. Kind of annoying. The camera also got stuck once in some kind of busy loop, and I had to restart it by popping out the batteries. Of course the Polaroid support site is useless for trouble-shooting problems. The pictures were easy enough to download to my Mac and iPhoto. Not sure positively about the picture quality: I’m fairly sure my son got off of auto focus at some point. The viewfinder’s picture is somewhat grainy, so it’s hard to tell if the resulting picture is a good one or not.

All in all, my son loves this camera and it is easy enough to use. That is all I wanted from it, and that’s all I got.

Review by Molly Ann Southwick:

I bought this for my 7 year old. He figured out to use it mostly by himself. On the product description it says it takes Triple AAA batteries, but it actually takes double AA. He loves the video mode, but wishes it has sound. This camera has no Mic. I think for the price this is a great camera to buy for a child to start out with. Things I like about it are that you have an expandable card slot so he can take tons of pictures, and it has a nice big screen on the back for him to watch what his is filming or taking a photo of.

Review by Jennifer’s Amazon:

I wanted a digital camera, but I also wanted one that had the color on it so I knew that it was mine. The camera has great zoom and it is easy to transfer the pictures to the computer. The flash on this camera disappointed me though, it doesn’t do great taking pictures at night even set on night mode, and once you take a picture using the flash it has like a 10 second hesitation before you can take another picture with the flash again. This camera works for me, but if you are wanting something for night or fast paced picture taking like sports, this isn’t your camera.

Review by M. Hammon:

I picked this camera deliberately for my 7 year old grandson’s birthday present. He wanted a digital camera and was constantly asking to use my more expensive Canon. The other requirement was that the camera be red.

I wanted the cheapest camera I could find that would do the job and be red. This was the cheapest on Amazon.

It is actually a pretty nice camera. The only problem I have noticed is that the thing eats batteries. The night I gave it to him, he ran them out, and we’re talking in about a 2-3 period of use. I bought him a case of batteries the next day. When I was over to their house the other day I noticed it was half gone and it’s been about 3 weeks.

If you want a cheap and nice camera, this one is fine, but be prepared to replace batteries quite a bit.

Review by Guillermo Hasbun:

This camera is AWSOME for a kid it takes better quality pictures than a sony worth $$$ super super cool but you

need to buy a memory card because the storage memory is low.Very cheap camera for all its features, you just need to buy it don’t waste this opportunity

buy it now this camera is lightweight simple to use and takes awesome quality pictures