You might think that the addition of an overhyped networking technology wouldn’t be enough to save a crappy product from itself — and in the case of the Concord EyeQ Go Wireless camera, you’d be right. Unfortunately, that insight seems to have escaped the engineers at Concord Camera, who have dressed up their low-end dog of a digital camera with the inexplicable addition of Bluetooth.
The camera itself is cheaply constructed, with a lightweight, flimsy plastic casing. The LCD display measures just 1.5 inches diagonally and it’s dim, making images difficult to see. The control buttons, made of black plastic, have a depressingly cheap feel.
The Concord EyeQ Go Wireless is no quick shot, with a shutter lag of more than a second. The EyeQ isn’t particularly smart about figuring out when to use a flash, either, so many photos are dim, yellowish, and underexposed. Even with the flash, lighting is substandard.
The EyeQ Go Wireless supports resolutions of up to 1,600 x 1,200 pixels with 24-bit color. At that rate you’ll fit about eight pictures on the camera’s puny 7MB of internal memory — more if you plug a Secure Digital card (not included) into the expansion slot.
The frosting on this soggy cake is Bluetooth, which lets you transfer pictures wirelessly. (The EyeQ comes with a USB Bluetooth adapter for your computer.) However, Concord’s implementation of Bluetooth is slow and flaky. Merely connecting to the camera took 17 seconds on average, plus another 16 seconds to transfer a 120Kb file. Also, we could send only one image at a time this way. The EyeQ’s USB 1.1 connector is more efficient but slow by USB standards, transferring files at a pokey 235Kbps.
Even at $150, this camera isn’t worth buying. You’d be better off making a pinhole camera out of a shoebox and some leftover 35mm film, and spending your money on a scanner. -Dylan Tweney
SPECS:
Concord EyeQ Go Wireless
$150
Weight: 4.4 ounces
Size: 3.2 x 2.4 x 1.3 inches
Specs: 2 megapixels; 7MB internal flash memory; SD card slot; Bluetooth 1.1; USB 1.1
www.concord-camera.com
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Link: Concord EyeQ Go Wireless
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