Following up the recently reviewed Polaroid C201 car camera is it’s bigger brother, the Polaroid C271 car camera. Like the C201 this is a nice looking unit but opts for a wider design giving you a 2.7″ screen and comfortable button layout.
The Polaroid C271 is a 1080p full HD video camera that can be mounted on your windscreen via the included suction cup. This was rather stiff right out of the box, both when attaching the camera to the mount and when mounting everything to the windscreen, and so it won’t immediately be something you can quickly remove and hide out of sight but is likely to ease up with long term use.
Another issue came about when attempting to insert a memory card, as you can see in the video below it wouldn’t easily click into place and it eventually took a pen to push the card down enough to click. The same was true when attempting to remove the card, a pen had to be used to click release it so it popped out. No card is included with the camera, you’ll need to have a spare/buy one separately, and it can take a MicroSD/SDHC card up to 32GB.
As well as the nice 2.7″ TFT display screen the Polaroid C271 also features an AV out, HDMI out and a USB port for charging/transferring footage. You get a USB cable and an in car charging USB cable with the C271 and it’s good to see the car charging cable is long enough to fit the camera to either the front or back windscreen.
The display screen is nice and clear and as well as allowing you to review footage it is also where you can look through the multitude of settings. In the video below you’ll see footage taken with out of the box settings, but there are a number of options for you to tweak and change, both in terms of picture quality (e.g. white balance) and unit operation (e.g. sound recording on/off).
Video quality is good, giving you a nice wide angle view of whats going on via the 130 degree camera lens. The camera keeps a nice steady image even when going over bumps, something lower cost cameras often struggle with.
The camera comes wit collision recording protection, fortunately this feature wasn’t tested out!
Rather than one large file the camera records chunks of files, making it easy to isolate the footage you’re looking for when browsing. File size sill depend on your settings, but during testing the files were just under 330 MB for 3 minutes of footage.
The captured footage is decent quality, both during daylight and in the dusk/dark, and would certainly be of use if you were in some sort of accident as car details such as make/model/colour/number plates are all visible.
It’s a pity the build quality lets down the camera, the fidderly memory card slot and the necessarily stiff mount let down an otherwise good package.
Available from Amazon: https://amzn.to/152QEtR
