Polaroid IS2132
I should preface this review by pointing out, I’m not a professional photographer. When it comes to cameras, I’m very much a ‘point and click’ kinda guy. Handily, there is someone in the office who does know rather more about cameras than I do, so can offer you the opinion of someone who’s more knowledgeable about this sort of thing than myself, along with my own musing on using it as an ‘average joe’.
First a few details. The Polaroid IS2132 came from Viking Direct, and it’s a 16 mega pixel camera, with a 25mm wide angle lens, 21x optical zoom, 2 inch display, HDMI Type B output, and weighs 771 grams. The camera has ‘blink detection’ and can take panoramic photos and HD video, and has ISO up to 3200. Also has a build in ‘pop-up’ flash.
It’s what my photographer friend refers to as a ‘bridge camera’. Looks like an SLR, and has some of the controllable features you get with an SLR, but you can’t use different lenses. It is however, massively cheaper. If, like me, you’re not a very proficient photographer, you can stick all the settings on auto, and get some pretty decent shots. But if you want to learn more about pro photography tecniques, this camera is a great place to start. It has a ridiculous amount of manual control over all aspects of your photography, if you know what you’re doing – aperture, white balance, shutter speed etc… It also has some nice little features if your a casual photographer, and want to play around in camera with sepia tones, black & white, or a variety of other colour manipulation options.
I took this camera out when I was at ComicCon a few weeks back, and was very impressed with the battery life, having it on most of the day without it running out of power. I also shot a number of 20-30min videos during that time to, and still had power at the end of it. One issue I did find whilst shooting video was the sound appears to cut out whenever the zoom is used, which was somewhat annoying when recording panels, but now I know it does it, that’s something I can work around. The zoom itself is great though, keeping really good clarity to the shots, and overall the build quality is extremely solid.
8/10 – Great ‘point & shoot’ bridge camera, with some excellent pro features.
