I took Polaroid XS100 camera with me on a weekend trip and recorded video snippets through the entire day. I made about 2 hours of recording (on a single charge battery charge). The attached video contains four clips took during this trip in various lighting conditions.
✔ Driving in the car
Note when the sun hits the camera you can see a bit of a halo from the dome that covers the lens. The anti-vibration feature of the camera is very effective in the car.
✔ In bright day light
Excellent color and sharpness especially when the sun is behind
✔ Inside a store
Worked well in a small quarters and fairly dim lighting
✔ At night
Very good low-light performance. The anti-vibration feature of the camera is not effective for larger scale shakes which is the results of the bobbing camera during a walk.
The camera has 170 degree wide angle lens. I used Class 6 MicroSD card. F2.8 Fixed Focus Lens focused well and performed well in low light. My video was shot as 960p.
Video options are:
1080p: 1920x1080p / 30FPS / 16:9
960p: 1280X960P / 30FPS / 4:3
720p:1280x720 / 60FPS (Slow Motion) / 16:9
720p: 1280x720 / 30FPS/ 16:9
Photo options are:
Resolutions 16MP, 5MP, 3MP, VGA
Photo Mode: Single / Burst (x10) / Time Lapse (5,10,30,60)
The camera records two formats of files at once - full size and low-resolution "thumbnail" video, which is useful for sharing.
My full size video was generated in .mov format. I converted it to .mp4 for editing with my Linux-based video editing tools.
The first photo shows everything that comes in the package: the camera, the pouch, HDMI cable, and a large number of mounts and sticky pads.
The camera is water tight up to 30 feet. The lens is covered with a dome (see photo #5), the back has a water tight lock (see photo #4). Photo #3 shows the back of the camera with the cover off. The top slot is for micro sd card, below is HDMI port, below it the charging port, to the left the selection for video format, on the right the reset hole.
Note: I had trouble turning on the camera for the first time after charging, but pushing the reset button fixed the problem and the camera turned on.
The video camera is operated by two buttons on the top of the camera (see photo 4). The long button with dots control video recording. And the smaller button in front is used to turn on the video camera on and off (with a slight hold) or take still pictures (with a light press without any hold).
Photo #6 shows the bottom of the camera where various mounts attach. The mounting screw is plastic and one has to be careful not to strip it with a metal mount.
Photo#2 shows the camera on 1 inch gridded mat for size reference. The camera weights 6 oz. It is 4 inches long, and the lens portion is 1 3/8 inches in diameter. The pouch has a Velcro closing, and it is possible to put the camera into the pouch even when it is attached to a mount.
Other starting and setting, the only setting you can change directly from the camera is the format (HD or FHD). To change other settings you need to connect the camera to the PC (Mac or Windows) and use the Polaroid software. For example, if you wanted to set the camera to take pictures on a certain interval. This requires you to pre-plan what you will do on each trip unless you can take a laptop with you. I wish I could control more things directly from the camera, but that would probably have made the camera larger.
If you have Windows-based PC Polaroid.exe is automatically installed from the camera into the micro sd card when you connect PC for the computer for the first time. If ou have a Mac you need to down load the software by from the web site (note that web site name is polaroidaction-dot-com (not polaroid-dot-com). Because my primary operating system is Linux the software did not get installed automatically and I needed to download Windows executable from the web site. The file name you download from the website is called setting_win.exe (not polaroid.exe as the file that is automatically installed).
The camera comes with HDMI cable that allows you to view and manage the content of your MicroSD card on your TV. However, I found that for me it easier to remove the MicroSD card and place manage it from the computer.
Polaroid camera comes with gravity sensor G-Sensor, which auto rotates the image even if you mount to the camera upside down. It is not totally fool proof as one of my video was recorded side ways. I must have rotated it after I turn the camera on but did not realize it. But the rest of around 30 videos were perfectly oriented.
Audio recording worked, but recorded audio sounds fairly low compared to my other video camera.
I was provided a sample for a review be it positive or negative, and I tried to cover both the positives and negatives of my experience.
Overall, I thought it was a fun camera to use and I thought it produced pretty good results.
You can find it on Amazon by following this link.
Ali Julia review ★★★★★
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