Photo from Four Corner Store website
Sample pictures from the Super Spy Digicam from Four Corner Store are at the bottom of this review.
Let me start by saying I wasn’t expecting much with this toy, but for $65 I was expecting much more than I got. The Super Spy Digicam is available and I bought it from Four Corner Store. Prior to purchasing the camera I went to the Four Corner Store Facebook page and requested sample pictures from the camera. Their Facebook page was where I first learned about the camera and where I saw their announcement that the camera was available. I had seen other fans comments and questions addressed and answered in a timely manner by the admin so I figured that would be a legitimate place to request the samples. Well 3 days went by without a reply and rather than persist I let the 8 year old in me control the situation and pulled out the credit card and ordered the camera.
The camera arrived sooner than I thought it would about 4 days after I ordered it so that’s nice. It came so quick in fact that I hadn’t had time to get to Amazon and order a micro SD card which is required by the camera so I ran right up to Staples and paid too much for one rather than wait.
So back to my expectations, I read the specs on the camera, 2 mega pixels and pinhole lens are the only ones that really matter. So my thought was that I would be using this as a fun Lomo type of camera, with no visual feed back for composition, no bells and whistles for exposure. I was excited to take the little guy out into the world and play with some low tech creativity.
The first thing I ran into was the difficulty in actually operating the camera. The design is an attempt to replicate the looks of an SLR with no thought to the actual functionality the camera. I quickly came up with a few different ways to hold and operate the camera in different scenarios but none were optimal.
I went about taking pictures for an hour or so, starting to get creative and really looking forward to seeing the results. I decided that since I had no idea what the field of view was or what kind of system was in place to handle exposure I’d get to the computer and check the results to this point.
Plugging the micro USB into the camera and my Mac I had to mess with the camera power and reconnect a few times to get the camera/Micro SD recognized by my Mac. I went ahead and loaded them right into Lightroom. As the thumbnails loaded the first thing I noticed was the white balance was all over the place but no biggie, the thumbnails seemed soft but that’s what I expected from the pinhole lens.
As I started to open the images to view at full size I quickly became more and more disappointed. Rather that the typical softness and haze that comes with pinhole and plastic optics I was confronted with choppy pixels, artifacts a real digital mess. It’s like the sensor is really only .5 megapixels and some half baked program is up-rezzing it so they can call it a 2 megapixel camera.
Here’s the bottom line, if this camera was $9.99 and I had seen sample pictures, I probably wouldn’t have bought it. For $65 I am thoroughly disappointed, mostly in myself for not being smarter about the purchase and waiting for someone else to write this review.
I’m going to be giving this camera away to one of my Facebook fans once Camera Campus reaches 200 “LIKES” so take a look at the sample pictures below then head over and “LIKE” Camera Campus on Facebook.
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