2023 Weekly Challenge Week 51: Coleman Xtreme 2

Back in January for one of my first reviews I reviewed an off-brand pocket camera that was produced by GE.  It was indeed a bizarre fever dream of a cheap (but modern) digicam that became prevalent right before the rise of Smartphones when every company even ones that normally did not make cameras wanted to have a slice of the point and shoot digital camera market.

Last week I shot another of these, this time a design that traded a limited optical zoom to be waterproof; the Coleman Xtreme 2. 

By reviewing this camera and reading its manual I learned a few things from that gave me an idea of how the GE was so bad as well (namely the discrepancy on the sensor- which I will dive into later).  For now let's get some product photos up.  I'm not going to lie, aesthetically it has a unique design which gives it points over the GE RS1400 off the bat:

By the mid 2010s smartphones had started to take away more and more of a share of the pocket camera market.  However there was still one last big push to make pocket cameras and one niche in particular remained: Waterproof cameras.  These cameras were bought for both taking on a cruise in case you decided to go snorkeling and to give to kids who could throw the durable little cameras around without risking breaking your really expensive smartphone.

This camera is something my significant other won at a raffle 8 years ago, and had not been opened or used until my review of it.  Luckily unlike the Olympus D390 I bought that was DOA this camera did indeed work when I put two new AAA batteries (yes it takes AAA batteries) into it.

Just like the GE RS1400 you can't find any information about this camera online: when it was first made, any sort of reviews, etc. This camera is a bit more common to find for sale however then the RS1400 on E-Bay or overstock stores that have likely been sitting on a palette of them since the mid 2010s.

Since I have the box and manual for this camera I found that the manual has some interesting information which tells us more about this camera and even contradicts the writing on the outside of the box and top of the camera.  

The manual hints that this camera was released in 2015 however it is impossible to verify this as just like the GE camera no one other then myself has ever done a review on it that I can find, and no one with an endorsement from Coleman for sure. There's probably reasons for this as its well, pretty terrible.

Lets expand on the contradictory information from the camera's manual: on the top of the camera and package in bold text is written "16 Megapixels". Which was about what one would expect to see on a late model digicam right?  However when you open the manual you are told that the camera has a 1/3.2" CCD sensor with "5 million ACTIVE pixels" so in reality it is a 5mp camera.  

Which tracks for the size of the lens and overall poor build quality of this camera.  Coleman likely took surplus sensors from one of the first generation smartphones they could get in bulk for next to nothing and slapped it into this waterproof case.

How it gets the 16 megapixels is by in-camera interpolation which is a fancy way of saying it just blows up the pixels in this particular case.  Think of how a Digital Zoom works- its similar to that except instead of cropping in on one area of the photo this expands the entire image.  The results are just what you expected pretty terrible.

On top of this, this camera is a Manual Focus pocket camera.  Yes you heard it, Manual Focus on a Digicam in 2015.  This automatically takes away points from the GE RS1400 as while the AF on that camera wasn't great atleast it had it.

I was originally going to review this camera two weeks ago, but after a day of shooting with it in "16 megapixel mode" and not having any real useable images from that set, I decided to take a step back; there had to be something I was missing as there was no way the camera could be that bad.

Well, I was half correct.  Not really mentioned in the manual there was an adjustment lever on the side of the camera for focusing between macro and landscape (infinity focus).  The camera was by default set on Macro mode and I found that this setting threw everything out of focus as even photos taken up close were extremely blurry.

Switching to the landscape mode helped a lot, but the camera still had a hard time getting a solid focus on anything with this early cellphone style pan-focus lens it had on it, but it provided me with a few useable shots instead of practically none from the first time I took it out.

After I figured that out, and set the resolution to what the hardware of the camera could do (5mp) results got marginally better.  I got one really nice shot with it that did in earnest really surprise me (which you will see below, the landscape photo of the frozen lake) but only under very specific conditions did it pull that off.

Otherwise the shots were noisy at any ISO, blurry, smudged and lacked detail. It reminded me very much of the early attempts at phones for photography which furthered my hunch that was exactly what it was: a sensor and lens from a five to ten year old phone that was re-packaged into a waterproof case.

As such, I have some insight that since the GE RS1400 had similar quality issues it likely was the same story; take an old camera phone sensor, put it into a camera and then market its Megapixels to be higher then it actually was to make it sell. It's such a bizarre shovelware strategy which is proven to work especially in days before online reviews were centralized.

The build quality however was much better then the GE RS1400.  The rubber grip made it feel nice in your hand and the buttons including the shutter were more responsive; which for a cheap waterproof camera is impressive.  The video button was not on the top next to the power button and the power button itself was not easy to accidently double tap to turn off right away.

Overall however this camera was worse then the GE camera which is saying something.  It lacks basic features such as Autofocus.  The menus are extremely laggy and irratating to navigate.  The camera has a silent shutter with a terrible shutter lag even if you leave the digital shutter sound on. 

When you take a photo with this camera the "shutter noise" actually fires off before the shutter does making it extremely easy to move the camera while taking a photo as the tone implies that the the photo taking is done.

To sum this review up: I only liked the fact that this camera's design was fun and unique and otherwise want to chuck it into the middle of the Mississippi River (but I won't because A its not mine and B it is so terrible its a fun conversation piece). 

And finally, let's move onto the photos, starting off with the one photo that I had to do a double take on when I got it to the computer because it somehow actually looks really nice, unlike the other 150 or so photos I took with this camera over the last week and a half.