Polaroid Cube — Cube Action Shooting

Most of us are famil­iar with Polaroid first of all for instant cam­eras and acces­sories for them. Some prob­a­bly also know about tablets, TVs, pho­to acces­sories and, of course, the com­pa­ny’s action cam­eras like the XS100i. The brand new Polaroid Cube falls into the lat­ter cat­e­go­ry, although its dimen­sions (35x35x35 mm) and fea­tures are far from the con­cept of a stan­dard action cam­era. It eas­i­ly attach­es to any met­al sur­face and has an extreme­ly attrac­tive price tag, mak­ing it an extreme­ly inter­est­ing solu­tion for active shoot­ing.

Design and fea­tures

The tiny Cube eas­i­ly fits in the palm of your hand, its round­ed edges and smooth soft-touch plas­tic cre­ate only the most pleas­ant impres­sions. The body of the cam­era is dust and mois­ture resis­tant, so light rain or snow is not a hin­drance to it. The nov­el­ty is avail­able in three col­ors: black, red and blue, but all three are unit­ed by a com­mon fea­ture in the form of a rain­bow strip along the entire body, which embod­ies the com­pa­ny logo.

On the back, there is a door that hides a microS­D­HC mem­o­ry card slot (up to 32 GB) and a microUSB port for charg­ing, trans­fer­ring pho­tos and videos, and for set­ting up the cam­era. Also behind the door is a switch between shoot­ing modes: 720p at 30 frames per sec­ond, or 1080p at the same 30 frames.

As men­tioned at the begin­ning, Cube is able to attach to met­al sur­faces, which was made pos­si­ble thanks to the mag­net built into the bot­tom face. The idea is sim­ply amaz­ing, as you can mount the cam­era almost instant­ly and almost any­where, but in real­i­ty, not all sur­faces have suf­fi­cient mag­net­ic attrac­tion. Know­ing this, Polaroid has launched addi­tion­al mounts for hel­mets, bikes, tripods, straps and every­thing else.

On the top edge, there is only one large but­ton — the only con­trol ele­ment for the cam­era. If you press and hold it for a few sec­onds, the cam­era turns on / off. Press­ing once while the cam­era is on takes a 6‑megapixel snap­shot, dou­ble press­ing starts video record­ing, and anoth­er press stops record­ing. This is where all the “sub­tleties” of the Polaroid Cube con­trol end.

On the front, direct­ly below the lens, there is a small LED indi­ca­tor that blinks red when video record­ing is turned on, and also blinks orange four times when the bat­tery reach­es 10% charge. This is the only cam­era feed­back that the engi­neers were forced to use due to the sav­ings on the LCD dis­play or Wi-Fi mod­ule for con­trol from a mobile device.

As soon as you insert a mem­o­ry card into the Cube, a small appli­ca­tion for Win­dows and OS X will be installed on it. The appli­ca­tion allows you to con­fig­ure the indi­ca­tor, acti­vate loop record­ing, and set the time and date.

The bat­tery life is around 90 min­utes and, as you prob­a­bly guessed, the bat­tery is non-remov­able, which means you can’t just swap it out and keep shoot­ing. By the way, this cam­era can record even while charg­ing from microUSB.

Pho­to and video qual­i­ty

The qual­i­ty of the video shot on the Polaroid Cube will be quite enough for social net­works and view­ing on mobile devices, but view­ing on a large HDTV will only spoil the mood.

The bitrate of 1080p clips is a mod­est 8 Mb / s: each more or less com­plex object in the frame, such as trees or a brick pave­ment, turns into a one-col­or mess. Low-light video is very, very “noisy” so you should think twice before tak­ing this cam­era for indoor shoot­ing.

But in the end it’s not so bad: the col­ors in the video are very beau­ti­ful and vibrant, the built-in sta­bi­liza­tion copes well with cam­era shake, and the expo­sure con­trol is quite smooth (except for real­ly dif­fi­cult light­ing con­di­tions).

The qual­i­ty of the pic­tures is about the same as the video: do not view them on large screens and do not shoot in the dark, and every­thing will be fine.

Con­clu­sion

At first glance, the Cube is far behind many of its com­peti­tors from Sony or GoPro, which can shoot video at high­er res­o­lu­tions with high­er frame rates and can last longer on bat­tery, but none of the cam­eras from these com­pa­nies has such an attrac­tive design, small size and instan­ta­neous attach­ment to met­al sur­faces. In addi­tion, the youngest cam­era of the same GoPro, the Hero 2014 mod­el, which recent­ly vis­it­ed our review, costs almost twice as much, which means that the Polaroid Cube clear­ly deserves your atten­tion.

Timur Bub­lik