Polaroid OneStep Film Camera

Like many other buyers, I was intrigued about the idea of owning a camera that eliminated the hassles of waiting to have your film developed. I'd used a Polaroid ages ago, and with the proliferation of incredibly cheap point and shoot cameras that produce decent picture quality, I assumed that by now Polaroid must have developed a decent camera even in the low end of the price range. The One Step I saw, was advertised with a 40% off rebate and the film though expensive at $22 for a 2 pack, didn't seem outrageously priced.

I purchased the camera and a 2 film pack and went through a pack to test it. First of all, the camera is fairly bulky as others have noted, but that didn't bother me that much. Second, though the outer finish is of a tough,textured plastic - the overall look has a really cheap look about it, somewhat old fashioned. And the slightly grayish/black tone and unattractive rubber eye piece , looks a bit tacky. The camera itself, the main body, really looks cheap - particularly the plastic levers for light and dark and the close up lens and lever. The instructions, are mystifying to some extent - virtually no writing , just symbols, though once you figure out how to insert the film and open it up , it's a snap.

My big beef with the camera is - the pictures are lousy! I'd read the other reviews and Id searched the web for examples of pics. I did see a few reasonably acceptable examples of scanned Polaroid pics though not from the One Step. I was a bit apprehensive, but also hopeful. I squandered a pack of film, just going from totally unusable quality to poor quality. I experimented thinking the shutter speed was slow and film was possibly poor, so maybe a perfectly stationery camera would help. I also guessed that the limited focusing ability may necessitate objects to be in a picky, optimal position. Unfortunately, no matter what I did the colors tended to look a bit washed out and there was a consistent fuzziness to the outlines of objects.
Combine this with the spotty availability of the rebates, some stores had them, others never heard of them, and the relatively high cost of the film and it really is a joke. The film which didn't seem that expensive initially, seemed very expensive since so few shots were even halfway decent. Compared to regular film now on sale, even the 400 film - 4 packs for $11 , a total of 80+ shots - Polaroid film I now realized, seemed incredibly expensive. My old point and shoot Fuji camera blows it away in ease of use and in the quality of the pictures taken. And additionally, the Polaroid pictures are encased in a strange plastic border.

My advice would be to wait until the digital cameras come down in price and increase in their level of quality, if you want a camera that eliminates the step of having the film processed. Some sites did have examples of very crisp looking Polaroid snap shots, though they were from the far more expensive model , which cost around $160 according to one site. I would stick with an economical but decent quality, point and shoot camera, the cheap One Step Polaroid cameras just aren't worth it.