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Iain Sinclair’s Poco Pro is a tiny, credit card-sized (although not credit-card thickness) camera. Despite its pocket friendly design, it manages to pack in a rather ridiculous number of features, especially given its projected £200 ($307) price-tag.
The sensor is a way-too-large 14 megapixels, which will also capture 1080p video. The blurb on the site says that the camera has “excellent low light performance and can outperform much larger and bulky rivals.” I remain skeptical.
Round the back you’ll find a 2.4-inch AMOLED screen, with touch buttons arrayed around its edges, much like the four buttons on many Android phones. The buttons also give haptic feedback when pressed. See what I mean about feature overload?
Amazingly, this little slip of a camera also manages to squeeze in a mechanical shutter, the kind found in SLRs. This gives it the potential to have almost no shutter lag – the delay between pressing the button and taking the picture.
The Poco Pro doubles as an MP3 player, too, with a jack socket and built-in speaker, and media is stored on a microSD card, which might slow things down a little.
Want more? Sure. How about direct uploads to YouTube or Flickr (when connected to a computer, I assume, as there is no other connectivity). Or two LED flashes, not one, on either side of the lens. One thing you don’t get, though, is a zoom.
It seems hard to believe that a camera could have all this and also be well made for just $300. And to be honest, we’ll probably all forget about it before it finally ships in June next year, or possibly never ships, confined to the insides of a CAD application for the rest of its days.
The sensor is a way-too-large 14 megapixels, which will also capture 1080p video. The blurb on the site says that the camera has “excellent low light performance and can outperform much larger and bulky rivals.” I remain skeptical.
Round the back you’ll find a 2.4-inch AMOLED screen, with touch buttons arrayed around its edges, much like the four buttons on many Android phones. The buttons also give haptic feedback when pressed. See what I mean about feature overload?
Amazingly, this little slip of a camera also manages to squeeze in a mechanical shutter, the kind found in SLRs. This gives it the potential to have almost no shutter lag – the delay between pressing the button and taking the picture.
The Poco Pro doubles as an MP3 player, too, with a jack socket and built-in speaker, and media is stored on a microSD card, which might slow things down a little.
Want more? Sure. How about direct uploads to YouTube or Flickr (when connected to a computer, I assume, as there is no other connectivity). Or two LED flashes, not one, on either side of the lens. One thing you don’t get, though, is a zoom.
It seems hard to believe that a camera could have all this and also be well made for just $300. And to be honest, we’ll probably all forget about it before it finally ships in June next year, or possibly never ships, confined to the insides of a CAD application for the rest of its days.
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