MonorailMan
<font color=red>Relatively Cheap Date, Dewars Alw
- Joined
- Jul 12, 2007
- Messages
- 1,766
I just had to get this out of my system.......Bear with me.
My roomie re-gifted me a cheap digital point-and-shoot camera a couple days ago because he said it was a lousy camera. My roomie's sense of taste is questionable most of the time, so I thought I'd give it a looksie to see if it was in fact as bad as he said it was.
Ladies and gentlethings........behold: The Cobra Digital DC4200!
Ever heard of Cobra Digital before? Me neither. Being a professional photog, I've probably used around 50 cameras in my lifetime..........and this one is BY FAR the worst piece of garbage I've ever used. Seriously. I've used pinhole cameras that were more reliable.
--It has the most unintuitive interface I've ever seen. (It's like playing a guessing game, even after you've read the instructions.)
--After actually figuring out how to take a picture, I noticed there were tons of "dead pixels" all over the image (pixels that appear white where no color information was recorded).
--The LCD screen (if you can actually call it that) is less than an inch big!
--When I tried to use it as a web cam (despite the package calling itself a "PC cam") I realized I only had about 10 seconds to plug the USB cord into the camera and then into the PC after getting to the "Web cam menu", otherwise the camera would turn itself off due to being on a timer.....which you can't change.
--It's being marketed as a good camera to use in classrooms because "it's cheap and so easy to use". In reality, it's the most difficult camera I've ever used, and school kids would probably start classroom fires if they had to use these.
This thing sells for around $50, and in my opinion it's overpriced by about $45. I have a $20 mini digital camera by Brookstone--a company known more for its back massagers and calming sound machines than for its cameras-- that's far superior to the Cobra. The Brookstone camera it about half the size of the Cobra, and the screen is twice as big.
Okay okay.........I'm done now.
I think I need one of those calming sound machines.
My roomie re-gifted me a cheap digital point-and-shoot camera a couple days ago because he said it was a lousy camera. My roomie's sense of taste is questionable most of the time, so I thought I'd give it a looksie to see if it was in fact as bad as he said it was.
Ladies and gentlethings........behold: The Cobra Digital DC4200!
Ever heard of Cobra Digital before? Me neither. Being a professional photog, I've probably used around 50 cameras in my lifetime..........and this one is BY FAR the worst piece of garbage I've ever used. Seriously. I've used pinhole cameras that were more reliable.
--It has the most unintuitive interface I've ever seen. (It's like playing a guessing game, even after you've read the instructions.)
--After actually figuring out how to take a picture, I noticed there were tons of "dead pixels" all over the image (pixels that appear white where no color information was recorded).
--The LCD screen (if you can actually call it that) is less than an inch big!
--When I tried to use it as a web cam (despite the package calling itself a "PC cam") I realized I only had about 10 seconds to plug the USB cord into the camera and then into the PC after getting to the "Web cam menu", otherwise the camera would turn itself off due to being on a timer.....which you can't change.
--It's being marketed as a good camera to use in classrooms because "it's cheap and so easy to use". In reality, it's the most difficult camera I've ever used, and school kids would probably start classroom fires if they had to use these.
This thing sells for around $50, and in my opinion it's overpriced by about $45. I have a $20 mini digital camera by Brookstone--a company known more for its back massagers and calming sound machines than for its cameras-- that's far superior to the Cobra. The Brookstone camera it about half the size of the Cobra, and the screen is twice as big.
Okay okay.........I'm done now.
I think I need one of those calming sound machines.
I haven't tried to load any of the pics to the PC, so I don't know what kind of quality they are. You can see the pics on the little screen, scroll through the images, delete the ones you don't want, very user friendly!
