Polaroid x530

Written: 6.March.2006

I don't own an x530 (I don't think they were ever sold in Australia), so all this is based on what I have read. Hopefully I'll get one soon, but any US company I've found who sells them (K-Mart, Home Depot, Target, Amazon, the US Polaroid website, ....) will not send overseas.

Polaroid Corporation was founded in 1937 by Edwin H. Land to develop and produce sheet polarizers which he had invented. These are most famously used in sunglasses and photographic filters. In 1948 they produced the world's first instant film camera, also invented by Land. Land was a brilliant inventor who continued to work in the field of vision and colour, and was granted over 500 patents.
For further information on the Polaroid Corporation and their cameras, see Jim's Polaroid Camera Collection, Wikipedia, or Polaroid's own website

They entered the digital photography market rather late, and in contrast to their innovative and illustrious past they became very much a second tier brand with little market share, with their name on rather ordinary cameras produced by others.

Polaroid commenced US 'Chapter 11' bankruptcy in late 2001, and what's left of them has been bought and sold a couple of times since.

In September 2002 World Wide Licenses Ltd. ("WWL"), a Hong Kong-based subsidiary of British company The Character Group plc. signed an agreement with Polaroid for the rights to manufacture and sell digital cameras under the Polaroid brand.

Most recently, in February 2006 Flextronics bought WWL from The Character Group.

Anyway, getting back to the x530...
The x530 is the first digital compact camera to use Foveon's revolutionary X3 sensor. (Foveon sensors were first used in a digital SLR, Sigma's SD9, and the SD10 refinement of it. I dearly love my SD10, but it's unfortunate for Foveon that only smaller companies have used their sensor. Although Sigma is a very popular lens maker, SD9 and SD10 camera sales were not high, and Polaroid is very much a second tier camera brand.)
Perhaps they were hoping to regain Polaroid's earlier reputation for innovation.

The Foveon X3 sensor is different to the sensors in other digital cameras (which are 'Bayer' designs). Each pixel in a conventional sensor registers only one colour. 50% of them are green sensitive, 25% red, 25% blue, and it uses interpolation to work out what's the likely actual colour at each pixel. The X3 sensor has 3 layers - one green sensitive, one blue sensitive, one red sensitive. So each pixel has all three colours.
The sensor in the x530 uses 4.5mp worth of sensors (3 layers of 1.5mp sensors) to produce a 1.5mp image, but one that is several times better than a Bayer 1.5mp image. The images can be stored in .X3F RAW format. This requires further processing once the images are transferred to computer, but provides ultimate quality and allows for changes to be made to the image with no loss of quality. When pictures are taken as .JPGs, the x530 can make them up to 4.5mp by using interpolation. Promoting a camera by its 'interpolated' resolution is a rather dodgy practice, and is not done by the major manufacturers. I suppose the makers of the x530 consider it a special case. Cameras with Bayer sensors, even without interpolation switched on, have already used interpolation at the sensor level. In contrast the x530 hasn't used interpolation at the sensor level, instead getting an actual reading of all three colours at each location. Since every Bayer sensored camera has used interpolation once (even without 'interpolation' switched on), the x530 makers must think that they ought to get one turn at interpolation too. Sounds fair enough to me.

In practice the x530's performance is mixed, and it had a long time coming to market. It was announced in February 2004, but only became actually available in February 2005 in the USA, and March 2005 in other countries. However in April 2005 it was recalled, only becoming available again in September 2005. What was big news in February 2004 is less big in September 2005.

Besides the sensor, its features are average for a modern basic but decent digital camera. Some features good, some substandard, but it probably averages out: 3x optical zoom; 640x480 movies with sound, but limited in length and only 15fps; manual focus as well as AF; 2 inch LCD, but not of the finest quality; spot metering; good macro performance; no options for setting contrast, saturation or sharpness for JPG images; various Programmed exposure modes are available, but not Shutter or Aperture Priority, or manual; shutter speeds and apertures are not displayed.

In general its performance is not good either, with slow start-up, slow AF, small buffer (especially limiting when shooting RAW), and poor higher ISO performance. However in good light images from the Foveon sensor are reportedly excellent.

The x530 has a recommended retail of 399USD, but it is not selling well even when sold for half of that figure. It does not seem good value at $399. In February 2006 you could get a camera with a 12x optical zoom and image stabilisation for that price. For 300-400USD cameras are available with 7 or 8 megapixel Bayer sensors. 5 megaxpixel Bayer cameras are available for as little as 150USD (Olympus FE-115), but more commonly around 200USD.

The target market for the x530 would be small too. Most buyers of compact cameras want ease of use, or small size, or stylish design. Those willing to pay extra want features such as long zooms. Or ever more megapixels. In contrast the x530's main selling point is image quality, but to get the best from it you should shoot in RAW and process the images on your computer. And I think that anyone prepared to do that is more likely to buy a digital SLR.

As I wrote earlier, I don't (yet) have an x530, but you can read reviews by people who do at Bruno Castrovinci's website and at SIGMADSLR.com.
Earlier reviews of the x530 when it was first introduced, and prior to its withdrawal, are here at http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/compentry/ and at Josh Waller's DigiCamReview website .

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