Well, what did I expect for $14?

The Polaroid Photo Max Fun! 320 digital camera really does prove that old cliche that "you get what you pay for." Truth be told, I only paid $14 for this silly thing...and it showed. I don't often write negative reviews; in fact, I typically only write them when the product is so awful that I just feel like I should let everyone know. The Fun!320 is just such a product.

As soon as I took my Fun!320 out of the box, the first thing that I noticed about it was that its weight was almost imperceptible. Now, with some kinds of products this would actually be a major positive -- but not here. That a piece of complex electronic equipment is extremely lightweight typically means one of two things:

1. It's made of space-age titanium.
2. It's made of plastic.

Now, referring once again to that purchase price, I'll let you use your surely excellent reasoning skills as a discriminating consumer to determine which of those two was true here.

The next bad sign was that there were only one or two discernible buttons on the whole device -- never a good thing. Some friends of mine and I have established quite reliably that the overall excellence of a piece of electronic equipment can almost invariably be measured in relation to the number of buttons, switches, knobs, etc. that it has -- more stuff to fool around with. And isn't that what electronics are really for after all?

The included software doesn't work with Windows 2000, which meant that I couldn't use it at all. After putting some effort into contacting Polaroid's customer support, I finally got a hold of someone who told me that no version of the software exists that supports Windows 2000, despite what Polaroid's website suggests. I was, however, able to get a TWAIN driver for Windows 2000 from their website, which allowed me to use Paint Shop Pro, which I already had, to import pictures from the camera.

I took a few pictures around the house, just to check out how well the Fun!320 worked -- a few of my cats, myself, my couch, etc. When I was able to iron out the driver issues and import the pictures, I was not at all impressed. My cats could just as easily have been bears, and I looked like some sort of gelatinous, ethereal being. Translation: the resolution was terrible, and the pictures appeared extremely fuzzy. This was a bad thing, since it's a fixed-focus camera -- that was as good as the pictures were going to get. Shortly thereafter, I gave up and put the camera back in the box. I later sold it on eBay at a profit.

In Polaroid's defense, this camera only retails for somewhere around $40. Having looked into the prices of digital cameras in a little bit in the past, I knew that this was inexpensive to the point of absurdity for this kind of product. In fact, I seem to recall that, a few months ago, the absolute cheapest one that Best Buy carried was in the $100 range. So, I should have known better.

Actually, I really didn't expect much from this camera when I ordered it (and boy did I get it!) -- I kinda wanted a digital camera, and I figured that at $14, which was inexpensive even for this camera, it was worth a shot. Don't feel too bad for me -- I sold it on eBay at a $6 profit.