If you’ve ever stood on an observation platform at Niagara Falls, at the edge of the Grand Canyon, or overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge, chances are pretty good you’ve seen a Tower Optical binocular viewer, and maybe even dropped a quarter into one, even if you’ve never heard of the company that made it.

These heavy, chrome-plated viewers are bolted to observation decks and overlooks across the US and Canada. But somewhere along the way, the viewers themselves became icons. And, for the first time in its history, the company is selling a small number of them to private buyers.

Tower Optical began in a Norwalk, Connecticut, machine shop in 1933, and remained in the same family until 2025. Between the 1930s and 1980s, it manufactured roughly 2,000 of the machines, with every component hand-assembled in the company’s factory in Norwalk, where the original machinery from the 1930s and 40s still stands. Today, the company has about 1,800 machines spread across roughly 400 locations in North America.

Tower Optical

In many places, these viewers have become part of the landscape as much as a means of viewing it. As someone with an interest in optics, what’s always fascinated me are the conditions these devices endure: freezing winters, blistering summers, rain, snow, ice, sand and every other environmental hazard you can throw at them. Yet the 10×42 binoculars inside keep delivering a sharp image, decade after decade.

Adam Rice, one of the company’s current owners, says the location and history of every viewer has been meticulously tracked by hand, decade after decade, as they moved around the continent.

Tower Optical / Adam Rice

“There are two push-pin maps at headquarters that are pretty outdated now, but they were used to track all the different sites, color-coded by location. Beyond that, we have a physical card for every single machine detailing its maintenance and whereabouts. I scanned thousands of these cards with a high-speed scanner to digitize the company’s historical records.”

Looking at one of these cards can be like a walk through history, Rice tells us. “If someone’s interested in the history of a machine, we’ll look at the maintenance cards… For example, machine #507 was manufactured in the 1950s. Our records show it went to the Staten Island Ferry in 1961, Battery Park in New York City in the ’80s, the North Carolina Zoo in the ’90s, and, most recently, Coit Tower in San Francisco.”

Tower Optical

One thing the company isn’t doing today is building new units, and the original manufacturing process may be lost to time.

“I’ve tried to understand the original manufacturing process, but no one is really left who knows how they were originally made. In our warehouse, there’s about 5,000 square feet of space filled with lathes and grinders from the ’30s and ’40s with overhead shafts to operate the pulleys. Our machinist estimated that if you had to make one of these domestically today, it would probably cost $15,000 to $20,000. The viewer heads are cast bronze and chrome-plated, and the rest of the components are iron.”

The glass inside has a pedigree of its own. “Interestingly, the metal plates on the viewers used to say ‘Bausch & Lomb Optical Viewer,'” he continues, “because the internal binoculars were manufactured by Bausch & Lomb. Many units still have the original Bausch & Lomb optics inside. At one point, they had a partnership where if binoculars needed to be serviced or replaced, we would send them directly to Bausch & Lomb, and they would fix them.”

Not much has changed over the years. The price crept up from a nickel, and the coin mechanisms were revised and hardened against people who tried sawing or drilling their way to the quarters inside.

Tower Optical

The biggest challenge the company faces today is one the founders probably never saw coming: “No one carries quarters anymore, but people still love using these machines, so our goal from day one was to retrofit them with tap-to-pay,” says Rice.

“Another challenge was that every machine was built by hand, so the dimensions aren’t exact CAD measurements. The engineering firm we worked with did an outstanding job engineering retrofit brackets that fit regardless of slight variations in screw hole placement between a machine built in the ’30s versus one built in the ’50s.”

What the company was unwilling to change was the viewers’ nostalgic appearance.

“Our mandate to the engineering firm from day one was that we did not want the look of the machines to change beyond the payment terminal itself. The terminal is very minimal, just a small black box, and we’re even considering putting a chrome foil on it to blend in further. The only other physical modification was drilling a small hole in the top shell for a cellular antenna,” Rice explains.

While many have encountered Tower viewers in their travels, it’s never been possible to own one. Tower Optical’s viewers are placed through revenue-share arrangements with host venues, but for the first time, the company has decided to sell a small number of the historic units.

Tower Optical

“It allows us to finance the engineering work and expand our network, since retrofitting and deploying machines isn’t cheap. We receive a ton of inbound interest from people who want to own one. It makes sense to pull the lever on sales for units we can’t retrofit,” says Rice.

“In an ideal world, we probably don’t want to sell more than 50 to 100 of them.”

Owning a piece of history won’t be cheap. According to the company’s website, they start at around $9500. “That includes full refurbishment, the original historical maintenance card, and a new pair of optics,” Rice tells us. “We work with OM Digital to supply those binoculars. Prices may carry a premium for units originating from iconic locations like the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center, or the Statue of Liberty.”

So next time you’re at a scenic overlook in the US or Canada, look out for a Tower viewer. Rice envisions a future in which they might even get more upgrades than its founders could have imagined.

“Moving forward, we’re exploring ways to layer in digital experiences, like augmented reality at high-traffic sites like Rockefeller Center, while keeping the core viewing experience intact.”

Want to stay up to date on the latest product news and releases? Add DPReview as a preferred source to ensure our independent journalism makes it to the top of your Google search results.

It’s been over a month since we launched the new DPReview.com website, and we wanted to give you an update.

We realize that a lot of the work we’ve been doing hasn’t been especially public-facing, so it hasn’t necessarily been obvious that this really is a Beta: we are listening to feedback and we are continuing to improve the site.

As well as fixing some glitches around user logins, we’ve been doing a lot of work to ensure that the site always delivers completely untouched, out-of-camera JPEGs, when you click through or download an image. This isn’t a requirement that the CMS software we’re using is usually expected to maintain, with the consistency that we need. So it’s meant a lot of work behind the scenes to ensure that we can live up to the high standards that we demand and that you can expect.

OOC images and HDR support

As a result of this work, we can now be confident that “Ultra HDR JPEG” files: JPEGs with HDR gain maps embedded, can be viewed correctly when you click through, but also when they appear within articles, if you have a compatible screen and browser.

HDR imagery is only likely to become more accessible and more prevalent in the coming years, so being able to correctly represent these files was important to us: both so that we can show the progress as it’s made and because it ensures we’re delivering all images exactly as they came out of the camera.

This may seem esoteric but it’s fundamental to the way our reviews are conducted: we provide unedited files precisely so you can draw your own conclusions, rather than just take our words for it.

Light mode and improved camera comparisons

With this done, we’re continuing to work on projects that you’ve been requesting and things that will be more obviously visible to readers of the site and members of the community. These include a “light” version of the site for editorial content, for those people who don’t like the site’s original white-on-black appearance.  We’re also working on a more advanced camera comparison tool that makes more extensive use of our camera specs database.

Neither is ready yet, but they’re just two of the more obvious features that we’ve heard the demand for, and are planning to deliver. In the meantime, please bear with us and keep letting us know how we can make the site even better.

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The Camera Intelligence Caira is something between a dedicated camera and a phone accessory. It has its own Micro Four Thirds mount, an 11.4MP sensor and a Snapdragon processor to handle computational tasks like multi-exposure image stacking, and autofocus and white balance calculations. However, it only has a single control – a shutter button – and no display. To actually use it, you need an iPhone (specifically, as it won’t work with an Android phone), which physically connects to the back of the Caira using MagSafe and digitally connects to it via Wi-Fi for liveview and control.

It’s also a camera that’s all-in on AI for both shooting and editing. It uses the tech to control autofocus, white balance and exposure while you’re taking a picture, and, after you’ve captured the scene, you can change it using an editor powered by Google’s “Nano Banana” generative AI model. The app gives you preset changes, like removing clutter from a scene, changing eye-lines and applying a VHS-style filter, as well as a chatbot to make more arbitrary changes, or to get feedback on the image you’ve taken. However, that bits that deal with generative AI are optional (and, indeed, require a monthly subscription), so we’ll mainly be focusing on how the Caira behaves as a camera.

The Caira is available for pre-order for $1000, though there’s more to the availability story.

Key Specifications

• Micro Four Thirds mount
• 11.4MP ~Four Thirds (244mm²) BSI CMOS sensor w/ Quad Bayer
• Brightness-map HDR JPEG output
• Qualcomm Snapdragon processor
• MagSafe mount for iPhone
• AI exposure, white balance and autofocus
• Built-in generative AI-powered editor
• 64GB internal storage

Note: this review was written after using the camera with several beta firmware versions provided by Camera Intelligence, and extensive use with the latest version.

Body, handling and controls

Mitchell Clark

The Caira’s body is made out of aluminum, and it’s a nice-feeling physical object. There are only a few features on it: a (disappointingly vague) shutter button, the lens mount, a power button, a USB C port for charging and 3.5mm microphone jack. It also has a cold shoe for mounting accessories.

While I found it relatively comfortable to hold in one hand, using my thumb to control it and index finger to press the shutter, I couldn’t help but worry about the connection between the camera body and my phone. Apple’s MagSafe is relatively robust, but it still just relies on magnets, which are only strong in certain directions. When I’m using the Caira, it’s hard not to imagine bumping my phone wrong and sending it crashing to the ground.

Mitchell Clark

Speaking of my phone, most of the camera’s interface is actually in its companion app. It connects to the camera via Wi-Fi, and provides controls for various parameters: aperture, shutter speed, ISO, exposure compensation and focus. You can also set the controls to “Advanced” to change lens distortion correction and white balance temperature / tint.

By default, the controls are collapsed, and the camera handles exposure and white balance automatically. If you tap a button to gain access to the controls, though, you can then tap the icon for each parameter to turn it into manual mode, and control it using a slider. I’ve found this to be okay for controlling focus – the camera has some decent assist tools – but not so great for exposure; the sliders make it easy to make big adjustments, but fine-grained ones like picking F4 instead of F3.5 or 4.5 require a fair amount of concentration. This is a camera best used in auto mode, with manual intervention only when necessary.

Mitchell Clark

I found that the Caira works best with smaller, lighter lenses (the kind that are thankfully abundant in the Micro Four Thirds ecosystem). I used it a bit with the OM System 12-40mm F2.8 II Pro, and found it a difficult to keep steady with how front-heavy it was; it’s difficult to compose when the preview is jittery and bouncy. It was still workable, but I don’t think I’d want to shoot with anything much bigger, and preferred using small primes.

Image Quality

Before we dive into image quality, a note on the sensor. Very much like the Panasonic’s GH5S, the Caira uses a slightly oversized Four Thirds sensor, that allows you to use different region of the sensor to produce different aspect ratios. But while the Panasonic went up to 10.2MP in its 4:3 mode, the Caira allows you to go up to 11.4MP in its 3:2 mode. This essentially uses the standard Micro Four Thirds sensor height but extends around 10% further than usual, horizontally.

This is because, rather than limiting itself to using the sensor area covered by the Micro Four Thirds imaging circle, it instead uses that extended region, warning you that your lenses may or may not be able to project light onto the whole thing. So far, all the lenses I’ve tested with it have performed well, with no notable vignetting in the corners, but it’s worth keeping in mind that there’s a potential trade-off between maximum compatibility and resolution.

And you may want to think twice before giving up any resolution, as the Caira captures less detail than most other cameras you can buy today. That’s not to say that it’s insufficient – the photos it takes will look great on social media and most computer monitors and small prints – but you don’t have to zoom or crop in far before things start to look a little soft. It also has a base ISO of 400, so the cleanest images you can get out of it will still be 1EV noisier than most other Four Thirds sensor cameras, at least in its single-shot mode. However, there’s a good reason why.

One of the Caira’s tricks is that, as we’ve seen with the Sigma BF and Hasselblad X2D II, its JPEGs contain embedded gain maps to produce an HDR effect. When shooting a high-contrast scene, the camera is reducing exposure to retain as much highlight information as possible (a task it didn’t always do successfully; I have a lot of pictures with clipped highlights). Then, it’s raising the shadows in the JPEG to produce an image that looks correct, but that includes dazzling highlights.

This is actually a method of shooting we often advocate for, given the strong dynamic range performance of modern sensors, so it’s interesting to see a camera that actually does it with relative success, even if it doesn’t seem like this sensor is the absolute best fit for that style of shooting. It would also explain why the camera’s base ISO is 400, as it’s trying to capture one additional stop of highlights, compared with the ISO 200 modes on most Micro Four Thirds cameras designed to shoot in SDR.

While the camera’s low-light mode can stack up to 16 images together, the results are usually still relatively noisy, without a ton of detail. The process also won’t work with a moving subject. Still, in some circumstances it can result in decent images, but it’s definitely worth taking the name of the feature seriously: it’s a low light mode, not a no-light mode. It also reduces the amount of manual control you have, understandably locking shutter speed and ISO into auto, as those parameters start to mean less as you stack exposures.

Both cameras were set to auto and told to set focus and aperture on the same flower. Note that the iPhone is set to shoot using its 24MP mode.

It’s hard to directly compare a more traditional camera with a phone, as the latter is always doing a lot of heavy lifting with computation, where the Caira currently only uses a single exposure outside of its low-light mode. However, I found that my iPhone 15 Pro was typically better at focus and making the lightness and white balance more true-to-life. What the Caira could do that it can’t, though, is use Micro Four Thirds lenses that provide more flexibility in focal lengths and deliver pleasing bokeh that comes from optics, rather than computation. Even when I didn’t prefer how the Caira interpreted the scene (or was annoyed that it missed focus), the photos had an undeniable look to them that phones still can’t replicate.

Autofocus and performance

Mitchell Clark

The Caira has three autofocus modes: single, continuous and manual. It has a single size autofocus point, and you tap on the screen to choose its location. It can recognize faces, which it can use to track a person as they move through the frame, though you can also tell it to focus on a non-human subject even when there’s a face in the frame. Outside of tracking faces, though, the autofocus point doesn’t attempt to stick to the object you put it over if it or the camera moves; it stays in the same position in the frame.

I’d be tempted to complain about the lack of generic subject tracking, but I won’t. The camera seemingly used to have it prior to the continuous autofocus update (that, or it was just extremely overeager when it came to identifying things as faces), and it was incredibly frustrating, wandering off the subject and resetting to its original point just before I was going to take a picture, with no way to turn it off. It’s a pity to not have it as a function, but better to have a system that predictably works for the things you ask it to do than one that gives you false hope.

Camera Intelligence gives you several options for how you want the focus to behave when you half-press the shutter, as well as manual focusing assistance tools, like a tiny, low-contrast “rangefinder” patch that you can line up with your subject to ensure focus, and a much more reasonably-sized magnified window that appears when you half-press the shutter in manual focus mode (though it’s rendered in black-and-white, rather than color).

Autofocus performance

The Caira doesn’t use a traditional contrast-based or phase-detection system for AF. Instead, it uses “custom-trained neural networks running on the camera to estimate from the preview feed exactly how far and in which direction to move the lens to bring the image into focus,” according to Liam Donovan, the company’s CTO. The camera also uses different algorithms for single-shot and continuous AF.

I found the single-shot mode to be, broadly, quite frustrating. It’s sometimes capable of nailing focus, but never feels confident. I have sequences of images where it would get the first exposure sharp, then drift out of focus in subsequent shots, and it typically ends up hunting quite a lot.

This behavior will still happen occasionally in the continuous mode, but it’s overall less indecisive and my hit rate with it was much higher. That’s not to say that its autofocus is as good as most of the other cameras I test – there were plenty of relatively easy situations where it still completely missed focus – but it was at least usable, which isn’t how I’d describe the single-shot algorithm.

There’s another issue with the focus though, which makes it even harder to trust. The live view preview, transmitted over Wi-Fi, is compressed to the point where it’s very difficult to tell if the image is soft because it’s completely out of focus, or if it’s just the low-quality video stream. This would be one thing if I could trust the AF system to get it right all or most of the time, but since I can’t, it makes getting sharp images out of the camera that much more difficult.

Speed

The Caira app is responsive on my iPhone 15 Pro, though that isn’t surprising given it’s a relatively modern flagship phone. What isn’t as snappy is the camera’s readout speed. The camera doesn’t have a mechanical shutter, so you’re stuck using the E-shutter, which takes 50.7ms to read out in stills mode. This means that any fast-moving subjects will have substantial rolling shutter distortion, and there’s a risk of banding when shooting under artificial lighting.

Using Wi-Fi, the pictures can also take a beat to transfer from the camera to the phone, and the app can occasionally get confused during this process if you try to review a photo too early, showing you your previous photo rather than the low-res preview of the incoming one.

A camera tied to a phone

Mitchell Clark

That aforementioned blocky, soft autofocus preview is just one symptom of the Caira’s total reliance on the iPhone it’s attached to. Shooting with it made me realize that I take the integration of a traditional camera for granted. If I see a shot I want to take, I can pull the camera out and, typically with a flick of my finger, turn it on and take the picture.

This was not the case with the Caira. Even in the best-case scenario, capturing a moment with it requires unlocking my phone (a process that, occasionally, means putting in a passcode), and waiting a beat for the Caira app to get back up to speed.

But just as often, it meant doing that, then having to switch back to the app from whatever I had previously been doing on my phone – looking at a map, texting my wife, sharing photos, or whatever else I needed my phone for – and having to reconnect to the Caira’s Wi-Fi, since it only stays connected to your phone for a (thankfully customizable) set period of time. And that’s assuming I even had my phone attached to it, which I wouldn’t always, since having a camera and lens stuck on the back makes it hard to use as, you know, a phone.

As a reviewer, I typically try to set aside my personal preferences when evaluating a product. Even if I, say, prefer 35mm to 28mm, I won’t hold the choice of the latter against a compact camera. However, the multi-step process required to take a picture with this camera was genuinely a massive barrier to me wanting to use it. I frequently saw something that I wanted to take a photo of, but ended up not bothering because of the hassle of having to wait for the camera to turn on (which takes around 15 seconds), then wait for my phone to connect to its Wi-Fi; a process that I mustn’t start even a second before the camera is ready, otherwise I’ll have to wait for the phone to fail to connect before telling it to retry.

It’s also worth saying explicitly: the only reason I’m even able to have these complaints is because I’m an iPhone user. If I had an Android phone, I couldn’t use the camera at all. It’s completely unusable without its iOS-only app.

This approach isn’t without its benefits, though. The wireless connection between camera and phone means you have near-unlimited flexibility when it comes to how you frame your shots, since you can pull your phone off the body while maintaining the preview, as long as you don’t stray too far away from the Caira. You can also remotely adjust its settings and trigger the shutter.

Despite how good many camera apps have become, the Caira is by far the easiest camera to share photos from, as they’re downloaded as soon as I take them. While some camera apps have a similar function, it requires manually starting the app and connecting it to the camera; of course, the Caira requires this too, but you’ll never forget to do it, as it’s a prerequisite for even being able to use the camera.

It has its own storage, but the photos – Raws and JPEGs – are also dumped straight into my Apple Photos library, where they’ll automatically sync with all my devices via iCloud. It’s really nice coming back from a shoot, opening my laptop, and immediately having access to all the pictures I just took.

It’s also rare that I’ve used a dedicated camera with a screen as good as my iPhone 15 Pro’s. Not only is it larger and higher-resolution than the typical camera screen and bright enough to be visible in most conditions, it can also easily display the HDR images the Caira takes in their full glory.

The future of cameras?

Mitchell Clark

Unsurprisingly, given the Caira’s ties to phone photography, it joins the relatively small ranks of cameras that shoot for HDR output by default. We’ve seen some other camera manufacturers start to adopt similar techniques, especially now that it’s possible to create backwards-compatible files that will display as standard JPEGs if your hardware or software doesn’t understand or can’t display the gain map. However, it goes further than any other camera I’ve tested, though, providing several “levels” of HDR effect, ranging from “Subtle” to “Extreme.”

When enabling the latter, the app even warns you that images taken with the setting will be displayed using your screen’s full capabilities, and that it could even compromise quality on older devices. Despite this, and somewhat ironically given the name, I found the differences in the images taken at the various settings to be quite subtle, and the camera doesn’t appear to adjust its metering (and hence highlight capture) based on how much HDR effect you’re asking it to apply. The differences are small enough to make me wonder if the feature is even working as intended, as is the fact that setting HDR to “Disabled” still results in images with an embedded brightness map that light up my MacBook and iPhone’s screen.

Whichever setting it’s at, the Caira’s HDR implementation has become appreciably more subtle and pleasing after a few software updates. Donovan says the company redid it to make sure it got things right, and represented colors accurately.

Mitchell Clark

Because so much about the Caira is defined by software, it’s comparatively easy for the Camera Intelligence team to update it, often in substantial and fundamental ways. During my time testing the camera, the company has improved the image processing in a way that genuinely leads to much nicer-looking pictures, and has added features I consider to be vital, like an exposure compensation control.

There are still improvements to be found – I found the camera still occasionally gets white balance and colors quite wrong, and some of my night mode shots ended up with corrupted rows of pixels – but, unlike other camera companies, I strongly suspect Camera Intelligence will keep working on it.

While the Caira was arguably released in a much less finished state than most cameras, with its barely-working AF and lack of critical features, I wouldn’t mind seeing other manufacturers focus more on addressing user feedback and making improvements after a camera’s release. While there are some that do – Panasonic and Nikon deserve a shout out for their most recent models – it’s rarely with the same speed as Camera Intelligence (which, in fairness, only has to support a single model).

I also appreciate the phone-like use of stacking to improve image quality in low-light, with no requirement to assemble the image in post, as we’ve seen with other cameras. While there are definitely benefits to the single-shot exposures, having the option to do multi-shot stacking would be a nice addition to smaller-sensor cameras (and, indeed, is a welcome inclusion on cameras from companies like OM System and Panasonic). Camera Intelligence also says that it’s working on a multi-shot high-resolution mode which, again, I would expect to be very easy to use, not requiring a desktop app to put it all together.

Finally, there’s the camera’s voice control mode, which theoretically lets you issue commands to your phone to control the camera in everyday language. I say theoretically because half the time it either missed what I said, or just decided to ignore it. When it worked, though, I could see the bones of a useful feature. I could do basic commands like “take a picture” or “shoot in black and white,” but I could also ask it to do things like “make the background less blurry,” and watch it adjust the aperture.

Mitchell Clark

That could be really powerful for people who don’t know photography terms, but was unfortunately a very mixed bag. Basic asks like “make this picture brighter” yielded no results, and requests that it did understand were sometimes clunky. If the aperture was in auto mode, asking it to change anything about it would only switch the aperture setting to manual. It didn’t fully implement my request until I repeated it, making it a two-step process. And sometimes when I asked it to make my background less blurry, it’d pick something sensible, like F7.1. Other times, it’d stop the lens all the way down to F22. It did this in the same shooting conditions, so it’s not the result of it being clever about how much light was in the scene.

Oh, and if I did try to do things manually and tell it to “set my aperture to F4” or F8, it consistently set it to something other than what I asked. It would show on the screen that it heard me say F4, then I’d watch as the aperture slider moved to… F5. F8 was F7.1, and a request for F16 got me F14.

Beyond a reliance on an external device, there are other aspects of the Caira that I wouldn’t like to see carried over to traditional cameras. While the company says it’s added additional guardrails to the Google Nano Banana generative AI editing, beyond what the model itself enforces, I’m still not a fan of changing the reality of what was captured. I believe the imperfections in images, and the challenge of working around less-than-ideal shooting conditions, are vital parts of the craft. I don’t like the idea of a future where photographers get used to just fixing it in post the way filmmakers creating a fictional narrative do, or where its the norm to assume that every photo you see has been altered with AI (though it may be too late for the latter).

The Kickstarter of it all

I suspect most people won’t come away from this review planning on buying the Caira, but if you have, a word of caution. Before working on the Caira, the same team made a similar product called the Alice camera, which was initially sold via crowdfunding site IndieGoGo. Despite the camera being available in retail stores, there are backers who have complained as recently as March of this year that they haven’t received the cameras they paid for in 2021. When we asked the team about the unfulfilled orders late last year, they said clearing their backlog was their “highest priority,” and detailed the logistical and legal hurdles that had led to the shipments being delayed.

While the Caira’s Kickstarter is far less overdue, its comments section is still full of people asking where their camera is, and bemoaning the lack of communication from the company. Camera Intelligence is still putting out updates to backers, but they’re not terribly frequent. It’s also selling preorders on the dedicated Caira website, which a bit of an uncomfortable look when the team is still working on fulfilling its Kickstarter backlog for two separate projects.

Conclusion

Reviewing a camera like the Caira is hard, because it’s such a moving target. If I had written this a few months ago when I first received the camera, it would’ve been a very different conversation. It’s been impressive seeing the camera go from something that, frankly, barely worked, to something that’s genuinely okay to use.

However, over that time I’ve also discovered firsthand why previous attempts at this kind of camera/phone accessory hybrid from companies like Sony and DxO haven’t really taken off, despite being released in an era where smartphone’s cameras were far less capable on their own. The vast collection of AI features and tech built into the Caira hasn’t fixed the inherent clunkiness to the experience of an app-reliant camera. True, it improves on the smartphone by giving you access to a larger sensor and interchangeable lens mount, but so would buying a traditional ILC, which will give you a far more enjoyable shooting experience.

Mitchell Clark

And that’s a shame, since there are some really good ideas in the Caira, even if many of them are still at the “has promise” stage of implementation. And the team behind it clearly has talent; the fact that they built a working AI-powered autofocus and exposure system and multishot-stacking algorithm from the ground up is impressive, despite still feeling like they need a lot of work.

Camera Intelligence bills the Caira as a camera for creators, for those who want good photos and video without having to understand how to make those. Unfortunately, it’s not there yet. Even as an experienced photographer, I often struggled to get it to do what I wanted, largely thanks to the autofocus system and controls. The results it produced weren’t enough of a step up from my (much easier to use) phone to justify the extra bulk of carrying it around, and the multi-step process to take a picture. Plus, the lack of stabilization combined with its somewhat awkward ergonomics can make previewing your image a bit of a pain unless you have rock-steady hands.

Still, my time with the camera was enough to make me hope that Camera Intelligence is able to stick around to keep working on the Caira so it can reach its full potential, and to continue talks with other camera makers who may be interested in using their technology. However, it’s hard to avoid the feeling that the former may be more of a proof of concept or beta test for the latter, rather than an actual consumer product, despite the creator-focused marketing. Even if those talks go nowhere, though, I’d still like to see the company stick around, at the very least so everyone who ordered one gets it.

Sample Gallery

Please do not reproduce any of these images on a website or any newsletter/magazine without prior permission (see our copyright page). We make the originals available for private users to download to their own machines for personal examination or printing (in conjunction with this review); we do so in good faith, so please don’t abuse it.

A note on captions: I’ve shot with three major firmware versions while testing this camera, all of which have come with relatively fundamental changes to the image processing and/or shooting experience. Images taken with the original firmware have it noted in the caption, while images marked “Shot with Continuous Autofocus Update” were taken using the latest firmware available at time of writing, and include the updates to the image pipeline that came with the second version of firmware.

Our guess yesterday about what Polaroid was gearing up to release was correct, but we didn’t expect just how big this launch would be. As we surmised, Polaroid has released a Pokémon-themed Go Gen 3 camera, but the launch also includes two additional cameras, three special packs of film and three accessories. Polaroid calls it its biggest collaboration yet, timed to coincide with the 30th anniversary of Pokémon, the hugely popular franchise that spans video games, anime and trading cards.

Polaroid

The core of the launch is three limited-edition cameras, which cover both the full-size Polaroid Now Gen 3 and the tiny Go Gen 3, which was released earlier this summer. The Now Gen 3 version, which takes full-size i-Type film, takes the styling of a Poké Ball, with bold red, white and black colors. 

Polaroid

For those who want something a bit more character-focused, the Go Gen 3 is available in a Pikachu-styled version with a bold yellow body and a hand strap shaped like Pikachu’s lightning-bolt tail. Or you can go for the Sylveon Edition, which features that Pokémon’s soft pink, blue and white colors. All three cameras also feature Poké Ball-shaped shutter buttons for an added thematic touch. 

Polaroid

The cameras aren’t all, either. If you already own a Polaroid camera, you don’t have to miss out on the fun, as the company also released three limited-edition packs of film, one full-sized i-Type and two packs of the smaller Go film. The i-Type film, like the camera, is more broadly Pokémon themed, with frames that feature iconic characters like Charmander, Clefairy and Squirtle. The Go film matches the theme of each of the Go cameras, with one pack focused on Sylveon and the other for Pikachu. Each pack comes with custom dark slides designed around the collaboration as well. 

Polaroid

Finally, Polaroid also has three accessories for Pokémon fans. There’s a Polaroid Go Poké Ball camera case and Poké Ball photo album for photos from the Go, along with a Pokémon edition camera strap, which is compatible with both the Now Gen 3 and Go Gen 3.

Polaroid

The Polaroid Now Gen 3 Pokémon costs $140, while the Go Gen 3 Pikachu and Sylveon editions are $100, all of which represent a $10 premium over the standard versions. Likewise, the limited-edition film is slightly more expensive, with the i-Type coming in at $23 and the Go film at $25 for a double pack. 

The Polaroid x Pokémon collection is only available in limited quantities, though Polaroid didn’t provide any specifics about how many are available. Pre-orders open August 25, with a full release on October 5.