Last month I wrote a review of the Polaroid Cube, the little $99 lifestyle action camera from Polaroid. My conclusion then was that it was “OK” largely thanks to some glitchy behavior. At the time of the writing I had suspected (hoped, even)that the Cube was defective, and shortly after I wrote about it it became obvious that this was in fact the case. Whew.
I have since returned the first Cube and received a replacement from the folks at Photojojo (who, by the way, have customer service on par with or maybe even slightly above Zappos) and am relieved to find the issues I called out were no longer present.
Flawed, probably not fatally
One issue persists, but it’s not one I mentioned in my original write up.
Condensation.
The only problem I have with this cool little camera is that under certain conditions a perfectly placed patch of condensation forms smack in the middle of the lens bubble which fogs out everything in the center of the frame.
It’s not always present. I first noticed it when I placed the Cube on the front axle of a tractor on a cool October morning at a pumpkin patch. An otherwise neat little FPV ride through the patch slowly becomes a foggy blur. Wanting to believe it wasn’t the Cube, I attributed it to the extra heat from the tractor engine and the cool air moving past the camera. However, with this replacement Cube I can’t deny that it’s an engineering design flaw. It surfaced again when I was recording salmon spawning in a local creek using the waterproof housing. What seems to happen is that heat created by the Cube internally is being cooled when it reaches the lens bubble due to the cold outside the Cube. Bingo, bango, condensation.
The thing that bums me out about this, besides having some otherwise cool videos ruined, is that it’s *inside* the lens bubble, which means if the condensate builds up sufficiently to create droplets, those are going right into the lens elements. This can’t be good.
But still, I love it.
It’s great.
Originally I said the Cube was OK. With all the weirdness, with the quirks, it was still cool. Is still cool. Look, it’s a hundred bucks, it’s small enough to take anywhere, it has some really cool mounts (by the way, the bases of which are all interchangeable) and, it turns out, can really take a beating.
