Polo D3000 - tacit confession

Many thanks to Alexander Shokur for providing the Polo SharpShots D3000 HD Camcorder.

Polo SharpShots D3000 HD Camcorder Review

I don't review digital cameras with fixed lenses, but this time the owner of the camera called me and offered me what he called a Chinese Nikon D3000 knockoff with three lenses. I was interested, but when the package with the camera and lenses arrived, I was quite surprised by the 'analogy'.

There's nothing special or exclusive about the camera. In short, the Polo SharpShots D3000 HD Camcorder is a Chinese phone sensor housed in a beautiful DSLR body with three lens attachments, no autofocus, no way to control key shooting parameters, and very poor image quality.

The same camera can be found under another name – Protax D3000.

This is what the Polo SharpShots D3000 HD Camcorder looks like without the lens attached. The white bayonet mount is made of plastic, and the paint is peeling off. The camera can be used even in this mode (without the lens attached).

Although the camera has a bayonet mount and a lens release button, the fact remains that these aren't lenses, but rather special attachments for the camera. Calling them "lenses" is only a loose term. The Polo D3000 shoots and functions beautifully even without lenses, with just the bayonet mount exposed, as it already has built-in lenses for its sensor.

Polo SharpShots D3000 HD Camcorder. Built-in flash.

The camera is made well to the touch, but as soon as you start looking closely, you realize that it is made very roughly - with rough edges, a flimsy battery cover, minor flaws, and a plastic mount. When you put on a telephoto lens, you notice a huge gap between the lens and the camera, and so on and so forth. This miracle weighs 450 grams.

Polo SharpShots D3000 HD Camcorder. A modest number of controls. Everything is extremely simple.

The good news is that the Polo D3000 can run on either a rechargeable battery or three AA batteries. The battery is immediately noticeable, labeled " Nokia 8210 " (a phone manufactured in 1999). The battery capacity stated in the manual doesn't match the capacity printed on the battery itself. It's also great that the Polo D3000 uses a 3-inch LTPS TFT LCD display. The display is covered with very thin plastic, and if you press lightly, you can see the crystals begin to "float." The display has 230.400 pixels (960 x 240), and these pixels are visible when holding it up to the screen.

Polo SharpShots D3000 HD Camcorder

There is also a built-in flash, to activate which you need to raise it manually, no button is provided for this. The flash is low-power, when shooting with a flash, the gap between the test pulses and the main pulse is very large. There is also an optical viewfinder, but it only works when the flash is raised, and its viewing angle does not coincide with those lenses that come with the kit. The viewfinder is terrible, without diopter adjustment. To use the viewfinder and not to use the flash, you must disable the latter using a special button that controls the flash mode.

Polo SharpShots D3000 HD Camcorder

Also, the camera has a hot shoe, but it does not have sync contacts and serves only to install additional diode illumination on the camera. One gets the feeling that when you work with the camera at every step you will find another swindle.

Polo SharpShots D3000 HD Camcorder. Lever digital zoom.

The camera, like any point-and-shoot camera, has brightly colored stickers with key technical specifications. One of them is the ability to shoot at a maximum photo size of 16 megapixels . The problem is, 16 MP is pure interpolation. The camera's sensor has only 5 'pure' megapixels (2560 x 1920), which are software-inflated to three times their original resolution!

Polo SharpShots D3000 HD Camcorder. THIS IS NOKIA!

When shooting at 2MP, the camera managed to capture 55 shots in 60 seconds, resulting in an average frame rate of just under 1 fps . However, when shooting at 16MP, the camera only captured 30 shots in the same 60 seconds, resulting in an average frame rate of just 0.5 fps . It's likely that the camera doesn't have a frame buffer, and the next shot can't be taken until the previous one has been written to the memory card or the camera's internal storage.

The Polo SharpShots D3000 uses SD and SDHC memory cards , and the camera has 28 MB of free memory for storing data. When I was shooting with a 2 GB memory card, everything worked fine. But as soon as I inserted a 32 GB card, the camera froze several times during startup.

Polo SharpShots D3000 HD Camcorder. That feeling when a flash costs more than a camera.

The camera always shoots in program auto mode. There's no control over shutter speed , aperture, or ISO. It's likely the camera itself doesn't have a good idea what to do with these settings. If you dig into the EXIF ​​data of the photos, you'll find that the camera always shoots at ISO 75. The longest shutter speed the camera could set was 1/3 of a second, and the shortest was 1/2749 of a second. The built-in lens has an F/3 aperture (it always shoots at this F-number, which is also listed in the manual), and additional attachments only reduce the already low aperture.

Polo SharpShots D3000 HD Camcorder

The manual and one of the attachment lenses list a focal length of f=7.45mm. I've empirically determined that the equivalent focal length of the built-in on-camera 'lens' is 50mm (I simply placed a D700 next to it , and at a 50mm focal length, the Polo D3000 and D700 had the same angle of view). Knowing the equivalent focal length and focal length, you can calculate the crop factor : 50/7.45=6.7. Therefore, the Polo D3000 uses a sensor 45 times smaller than a full-frame camera. If you look at the tables, you'll see that this crop factor applies to sensors with a 1/2,7" diagonal (physical dimensions 5.4 mm x 4 mm). Frankly, even the cheapest point-and-shoot cameras these days use a 1/2,3" sensor, which is larger than the one on the Polo D3000. In the end, even based on the matrix size alone, I can conclude that any digital camera will be better than the Polo D3000.

Polo SharpShots D3000 HD Camcorder

When connected via USB, the camera light turns red if the camera is off, and yellow if it is on. If you try to turn off the camera while USB is connected in standby mode, or switch the mode using the main disk, the camera freezes (the display starts to writhe in a fit of misunderstanding). The connection mode selection menu turns on for just a couple of seconds, and if you did not have time to select 'Disk' or 'Camera for', then a mysterious window appears in the style of Windows 98 and to the question 'Confirm EXIT Usb Function?' prompts you to answer 'Yes' or 'No'.

Polo SharpShots D3000 HD Camcorder

The camera has MP3 music playback function. To do this, just drop audio files into a folder called 'MP3', which is automatically created on the memory card. When connecting headphones, the camera will ask what exactly needs to be connected - 'headphones' or 'audio / video' ?. The player is controlled by a joystick easily and easily. The volume can be adjusted with the digital zoom slider. You cannot take photos or videos while listening to music. I've always wondered what am I missing on my cameras ...

Polo SharpShots D3000 HD Camcorder.

There is also a voice recorder function. Audio is recorded in '.WAV' format with 352 kpbs / 44 Khz bitrate. All functions are selected using the main dial shown in the figure below. There are 5 functions available:

1. Photo and video shooting.
2. View filmed material.
3. Voice recorder.
4. Settings.
5. Player.

Photography is only available if the first mode is selected. In all other modes, the shutter release is locked, and when you press the shutter button, the red diode on the left side of the camera lights up.

Polo SharpShots D3000 HD Camcorder

The camera can record HD video at 1280×720 30 fps using the h.264 codec in .mp4 format. I wasn't impressed with the video quality. Video recording is controlled by a convenient button. Audio is recorded using a mono microphone.

The camera menu is very simple and consists of two sections - the 'Menu' itself, which is called by the 'Menu' button and 'Settings', which are activated using the control dial.

The 'Menu' contains the following items:

• Video resolution. You can select the mode of HD, VGA, QVGA. Image stabilization in the last two modes does not work.
• Resolution. You can choose 2M, 5M, 8M, 12M, 16M. It is unfortunate that you can not choose 36M, I was hoping so. There are no other image quality settings.
• Stabilizer. You can turn it on or off. I suspect that there is no real stabilizer in the camera, and most likely stabilization occurs programmatically. And this is another swindle.
• Night shooting. You can turn it on or off. This item allows you to sight with longer shutter speeds, which is why the image on the display slows down. The shooting quality is not affected.
• Flash You can enable, disable and set auto mode.
• Quick way. The item is responsible for the shooting mode. You can select single, burst, or self-timer. During the self-timer, the speaker does not pick up, and the red indicators in the front do not blink.
• exposure. You can select an amendment exposure from -2 to +2 EV. When shooting, the exposure can be changed with the joystick, but only cyclically: +0.5, +1, +1.5, +2, -0.5, -1, -1.5, -2, 0. This method just freaks out.
• Flicker. You can select 50 or 60 Hz.
• Date stamp. The function prints the shooting date in photographs.
• White balance. Available values: auto, sunny, cloudy, daylight, incandescent lamps.
• The effect. Sets the shooting mode: normal, black and white and 'classic' (as sepia is called here).

Polo SharpShots D3000 HD Camcorder

The 'settings' section is still more modest:

• Sound signal. Turns sound alerts on or off. I determined that the signal level corresponds to the last volume level while listening to the player.
• Auto off Auto power off, you can turn it off, or set the interval for 1, 3 or 5 minutes.
• Audio-video mode. Determines how to use audio / video output.
• TV system. NTSC or PAL.
• USB mode. You can choose 'Camera for PC' or 'Disk'. Yes, Polo D3000 can be used as a webcam.
• Language.
• Pictogram. Enables or disables information icons during shooting.
• Clock.
• Format. Formats a memory card or internal memory.
• Silent confession. Oh this Machine translate. Run, Forest, Run... This function, or rather its translation, blocked all the negative from communication with the camera. It would be correct to name it 'Reset preferences' or 'Default settings'.

Polo SharpShots D3000 HD Camcorder

Three lenses come with the camera. In fact, these are not lenses, but optical lenses.

1. f7.45mm F3.2 BFL 2.85mm Multi Coating Lens / 2P2G - stock 'lens', does nothing, just covers the camera mount. Most likely, it still has some kind of weak coating of its only plastic lens.
2. WAL-83E 0.5x - wide-angle attachment. If we take into account that the focal length of the 'main lens' is 7.45mm, then with this attachment it turns out EGF 25 mm. The attachment has a strong distortion, almost the same as that of fisheye lenses.
3. OSTL 21x Optical Super Telephoto Lens - 'telephoto lens', unlike the first two lenses, has a focusing ring with a distance scale in meters, the ring travel is 90 degrees. MDF is 25 cm. During focusing, the front lens does not rotate, but the trunk moves forward. The lens uses a bayonet hood that can be mounted backwards for transport.

These are all prime lenses. But the camera has a 16x digital zoom , which nullifies the already poor image quality. The amount of flare is simply astounding; below is a short video showing the flare on these three lenses and without a lens:

Polo SharpShots D3000 has no autofocus and no contacts near the mount. Focusing with the first two lenses occurs through the focusing ring located near the camera mount. The ring has two labels: 'flower' and 'mountains and two men'. You can focus on the focus very quickly with this ring, but not accurately. With all this, the camera does not have a quick increase in the desired area, over which it would be possible to perform precise focusing. Instead, you have to use the slow digital zoom.

Polo SharpShots D3000 HD Camcorder

All three lenses are made with cheap plastic, very flimsy in the hands. The focus ring of the OSTL 21x Optical Super Telephoto Lens is rubberized but rotates jerkyly.

Polo SharpShots D3000 HD Camcorder

The lenses of the first two lenses are made of plastic to the touch. The rear protective cover is very easy to put on, but it is rather difficult to remove it. Near the rear lens on the lenses there are two arrows labeled 'Stuck' and 'Release' for attaching and removing the lens.

Polo SharpShots D3000 HD Camcorder

I'd say this is a ' BKI' type camera – 'No Image Quality'. The image quality is very poor, even worse. And fiddling with the RAW files won't help, since the camera doesn't support that format :). The lenses are incredibly blurry (even my phones produced/provide better quality). In the secret labs where they were manufactured, the scientists were apparently tasked with creating the most reflective lenses in the world. I don't even want to say anything more about the image quality :(.

Caution, sample photos are hazardous to health!

Here link to the archive with the originals - 73 MB, several photos from the camera on different lenses.
Conclusion

If you do not have a camera on your mobile phone and have nowhere to put 150 USD, then the Chinese have created an amazing gadget especially for you - Polo D3000 :). But for the same money, you can buy a point-and-shoot camera, which will have an optical (not digital) zoom, automatic focus, much smaller dimensions, the ability to control the main shooting parameters, shoot FULL HD, and give a much better image :).

By the way, 'SharpShots' translates as 'Sharp Shots', apparently the creator of the camera had a great sense of humor.

Hurry to buy the updated 2023 model here!

This material was prepared by Arkady Shapoval . The greatest support for the site is if you use links on this site, such as Amazon , when purchasing anything . It costs you nothing, but for this site, and therefore for my family, it's the main source of support.