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ranked #173,341 most helpful
out of 571,544,897 reviews
★★★★★
A Coleman - and Dark Room is Awesome
I have another Coleman tent with the Dark Room thing, more on which in a minute.
But first, the tent itself is pretty standard Coleman. For me that's a plus, since I've never had anything but good results from the brand. The tent is absolutely geared toward car camping at established sites, definitely, and makes assembly as easy as possible. I think the cited five-minute timeframe is a bit of a stretch (no pun intended), but certainly within 10-15 minutes this thing can be up. What I did appreciate is that the design made it fairly simple for me to put this tent up in low light, which is something I'm happy about after driving for a few hours, checking in, finding the campsite in a maze of campsites, and being left with maybe 7 minutes of light left and screaming kids who wanted to go to Disney instead of the Great Outdoors.
Ahem.
As for the dark room bit - yeah, it works. While part of the magic of camping is waking up to the sunrise, my wife doesn't want any of that. Dark when sleeping, semi dark when awaking. I've learned not to argue. Note that it isn't pitch black in there under full daylight, but certainly dark enough to offer a respite from the sun if you want. I like to add a fan for ventilation and I have a pretty comfy hidey hole.
Then there's the size. Yeah, the number of adults who are supposed to be able to fit in here rarely if ever match the number who actually do. I always could one person less for actual capacity, so a three person = two, a five = four, and so on. Seems to work for this tent. The design of the tent does offer a bit more vertical space than I was expecting, so that's also appreciated.
Performance, it seems to stand up pretty well....waterproof (yeah, under a hose spray it works quite well), and stands up to moderate (eg not gale force) wind acceptably enough. It's not something you take with you on an Everest trek, but then it's not designed to do that. It's a recreational tent.
So all that said, yeah I like it a lot. Good room for the fam, pretty easy to set up, take down is...well, I never get it folded up as nice as it was out of the box but it's easy enough, and it does a good job. I like it quite a bit.
April 2020 · Sports and Outdoors