Coleman Sundome Dark Room Tent (4-Person)

To start, I have a Coleman Hampton 9 person, 10x14 tent for family camping trips which I love. The one with double D hinged doors. It is fantastic. Anyway, I have a little one who loves camping more than anything and the Hampton is too large to set up in the yard for a weekend campout. So I thought I'd try the Coleman 4 person dark room tent just for that. Upon arrival, I set it up and found a rip in the rainfly.... not good. Decided to contact Coleman for a replacement instead of returning it. The CS rep I spoke with was very helpful, said they did not have a replacement, but would send a whole new tent if I wrote an "incident number" on the tent and sent photos of that and the damage. Well, I did as she requested, but no response from Coleman regarding the replacement, so it looks like I will be returning to Amazon. Now, as for the black out part, it is only applied to the top half of the tent. The bottom is black fabric, but lacks the blackout coating and does little to nothing at blocking light at the very part of the tent where you are sleeping - the ground. For me personally, that's not a big deal as like the Sphinx, I am up early with bare feet on the ground, watching the sunrise. But my little camper who this tent was purchased for, is not. The sun comes straight through the bottom half right where she is sleeping and wakes her up. There is a seam around the center of the tent, and the blackout coating is only above that seam, allowing the bottom half to be fully illuminated. I suppose if you placed the tent in a heavily wooded area where the sun could not hit the tent in the first place, it might work decently, but of course, Coleman advises against placing a tent beneath trees, for obvious reasons. Also, I noticed that the top of the tent with the coating had no condensation whatsoever, but the bottom half was very heavily condensated, which leads me to believe that the coating pushes ALL of the condensation to the lower half where your bedding is. The upside to that, I suppose, is that the condensation cannot accumulate at the top and drip in your face, but it will be so heavy at the bottom, it will run down the sides and collect in your bedding. We can't avoid condensation, seeing as how each person breaths out around a liter of water at night, but this tent does nothing to disperse it evenly to minimize it condensing in one area which can lead to a flowing stream. If you choose this tent, it will in fact hold a queen size air mattress, but I would not use a raised one as it will be too close to the domed walls causing you to bump the sides, and getting the condensation all over you and your bedding. Just another reason to look for a cabin style tent with somewhat straight sides if you need a raised bed in a small tent. Will be looking at the Ozark Trail dark rest tent which is a cabin style to see if it is designed any better as far as the blackout technology, though it doesn't appear to be. Update 6/17 While waiting for Coleman to decide on my warranty claim, I placed a piece of zip tape on the rip in the fly and left the tent up through 8 days of heavy rain and storms. We had local rivers flooding from the heavy rains. This thing didn't leak a single drop. NONE. It held up perfectly through the storms. My earlier assessment of the blackout coating wasn't quite accurate. After closer inspection, the entire tent is actually coated with it. The difference is, the upper part and the fly are also colored, whereas the bottom half is just black. Apparently, the extra coloring is needed to make the blackout coating truly work. One last thing, the tent can only be staked in the 4 corners leaving the centers of each side to dip in a little, giving less room inside. If Coleman would fix the blackout problem on the bottom, perhaps with coloring the outside as the upper part is, and put stake rings in the centers of the walls, it would be a 5 star tent. Since it does have a tub bottom, not sure extra stakes could be added?