Fancy a Quick Flash? (Polaroid i-Zone)

Member Name: thamisgith

Product:	Polaroid i-Zone
Date:	24/02/02 (589 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good fun, Sticky back photos

Disadvantages: Small photos

My oldest son, who is eight years old, received a Harry Potter photo album for his Christmas. Showing a remarkable degree of cunning, he waited until I had consumed just enough food and drink to be semi-comatose before he demanded his very own camera. Needless to say, for the sake of a quiet life, I agreed – as long as he would share it with his little brother (4).

So off we went, a couple of days later, to the sales to look for a suitable camera. As we have a drawer full of undeveloped films, and also so that the kids would see the fruits of their labours instantly, we decided that a Polaroid would be the best option. We looked at the standard Polaroids on offer and opted for the Polaroid i – zone.

This camera is one of those little flat ones - about 7 inches long and silver. It has a single purple button which is used to take the photos. The only other control is a switch which can be set for taking photographs indoors, outdoors in sunny conditions or outdoors in cloudy conditions. It also has its own flash, which works off two AA batteries (these come supplied).

The main feature of this camera is that it takes small, passport sized photographs – about one and a half inches by one inch in dimension. These take a couple of minutes to develop and have an adhesive backing so they can be mounted directly into a photo album or stuck on a wall or a door if the subject matter is likely to have general appeal.

The photos produced are of surprisingly high quality, but because they are small you need to be quite near to the subject matter when using the camera.

Over the last couple of days, my son has built up his photo album with pictures of his cousins, uncles, aunts etc. Each picture is accompanied by a witty caption – “my stinky cousin”, “my cheeky wee brother” – which he finds highly amusing. He also gives some of the photos away and I suspect it will be a matter of time
until blackmail and extortion commence.

I would imagine that this camera could be quite good fun on a drunken night out but I haven’t tried this yet.

The camera cost £19.99 and came complete with a 6 exposure film and 2 AA batteries for the flash. Safeway were recently selling a Barbie version (the same camera with a pink plastic cover and the word Barbie emblazoned across it) for £9.99.They also had ones with Tweety-Pie and Bugs Bunny on them for the same price.

You can get a pack of three 12 exposure films for £12 – not too bad when you consider that you have no development costs. The film is very easy to load.

All in all, I think this camera is a lot of fun and it should appeal to children and drunks – so quite a wide target audience then.

Summary: