Vivitar ViviCam 3650

...Thus, I happened across the VIVITAR 3650.


PRICE AND AVAILABILITY

I bought the camera from Bestcameras.co.uk but it is has since become widely available both online and on the high-street - when I was shopping at the weekend I noticed Tesco currently stock it. I paid just under £50 for the camera, though its price has dropped steadily since the time of purchase in April last year.


STYLE
...I saw it because it's not just silver: it has a colourful swish on the front, and the colour of that swish (a metallic blue) happens to be my favourite. The camera fits neatly into the palm of my hand - I'd provide evidence of this but in order to do so I would have to take a photo using said camera, which as you can guess would be slightly tricky. So instead, imagine the hands of a small person (not midget small, just petite) who is female and early ... more

I like photos, though am not especially skilled at taking them, and as such felt no need to invest in an expensive new camera at any time over the past few years. I had a 35mm that suited me fine, allowed me to produce pictures I was happy with and was not too expensive to run in terms of batteries of film. However a year and a bit ago I was growing quite jealous of my friends' ability to post pictures from our jaunts on various website, and decided I needed to upgrade to a digital camera. It was about this time last year, and I knew a 4 month trip to Australia was coming up. This presented two conflicting points to consider: on the one hand, I wanted a camera good enough to produce breathtaking snaps of the breathtaking sights I was expecting to see, but on the other hand I knew I would be travelling a lot, and not always staying in 5* hotels or carrying top class luggage. In other words, I didn't want a camera I would feel too sad about having lost or stolen, letting slip into the sand now and then or, as would inevitably happen, dropping onto hard floors. For this reason I decided to buy, quite simply, the cheapest digital camera that looked halfway decent. Thus, I happened across the VIVITAR 3650.

PRICE AND AVAILABILITY

I bought the camera from Bestcameras.co.uk but it is has since become widely available both online and on the high-street - when I was shopping at the weekend I noticed Tesco currently stock it. I paid just under £50 for the camera, though its price has dropped steadily since the time of purchase in April last year.

STYLE

I liked this camera as soon as I saw it because it's not just silver: it has a colourful swish on the front, and the colour of that swish (a metallic blue) happens to be my favourite. The camera fits neatly into the palm of my hand - I'd provide evidence of this but in order to do so I would have to take a photo using said camera, which as you can guess would be slightly tricky. So instead, imagine the hands of a small person (not midget small, just petite) who is female and early 20s, and work out how big or small a camera would have to be to fit therein. However because the camera is shorter than some, and because it still needs to contain all the super, magical photo-taking mechanisms, it ends up being a chunky devil, and not super-light (though at 120g it's hardly a heavy-weight). It also doesn't, for example, fit neatly into my back-pocket as some other brands might, nor can I wear it round my neck disguised as something else: this is definitely a camera-shaped camera.

It is quite stylish, though. Style through minimalism, that's its motto. The front is part blue and part silver, and holds the flash neatly in one corned above the lens. The top has two discreet buttons (one takes the photo, the other switches it on and off) while the base houses the battery flap and a small round hole, the function of which has not entirely been determine yet. The back has a decent sized viewing screen to line up your pic on (no separate viewfinder on this model), has the ready/not-so-ready light and holds the buttons that you use to manipulate your pic and change settings with. All in all it's nice and simple, not too many bells and whistles (except that darn hole…what IS it for?) and presented nicely and neatly. Others have said, however, that they feel the buttons are a bit small. My answer would be that I think they're fine and you get better with practice, but they insist. From people who use mobiles regularly, this is strange as the camera's buttons are much bigger than those on a phone, but still. I have occasionally had issues with the delete button sticking, but only if I am not paying attention - you have to get the angle or push just right which is easier said than done if you are absentmindedly flicking through deleting while, say, watching TV.

SPECIFICATIONS AND FUNCTIONALITY

This is a 3 megapixel camera which means it takes decent, clear photos, but they are not the sharpest available with top of the range cameras. At an operational level, keen amateur photographers are likely to find nothing wrong with the quality of shots this camera produces (see the end for some examples of mine) but if crystal clear clarity is your thing, you'll already know you need a higher spec. Bearing in mind that the first digicams launched often had only 1 megapixel shots, this one is a significant improvement on the early days of digital photography.

As well as taking general photos, the camera has the following features:

· short movie recording (the length depends on the amount of memory you've upgrade to as the memory card that comes as standard holds peanuts) although this unfortunately does not have sound.

· A review function that allows you to flick through all the pictures / replay any movies you have made. You can zoom in on these, magnifying them up to x4 but because the screen cannot expand, zooming in means you only see a little of the picture at once

· The deletion function allows you to delete photos without having to download them onto a computer - very handy if you're travelling and running out of memory

· The self-timer allows you to be in the shot you're taking, by lining it up, clicking the button and then dashing in front of the camera in the 5 or 10 seconds lead-in time you have given it.

USABILITY

I find this an extremely easy camera to use, as do most of the strangers who accost me offering to take my photo with it ("Surely you want a shot of yourself flying through the air with the greatest of ease?" one asked cheesily while we were at Trapeze lessons at Sydney Olympic Park). You don't have to do anything before taking a photo other than turning on the camera, pointing and shooting. There is no need to wind it on, or switch on a flash, or any of those other things people used to do with photo equipment. Reviewing photos is also easy, as is deleting them, though there is a handy safe guard here in case you accidentally click erase, the camera equivalent of a PC's "Are you sure you wish to permanently delete these files?"

For me an important feature of any digital camera is its ability to download photos onto a permanent base such as my laptop, and this one does marvellously in this respect. When I first got it I dutifully installed the software and read the instructions, but I soon discovered that none of that was really necessary as in order to get photos from A (the camera) to B (a computer) all you have to do is plug A into a cord (supplied) which then plugs into B, and hey presto, photos start transferring. Most operating systems (from about Windows 2000 onwards) have photo software as standard, so there's no need for the CD they kindly supply. For this reason I was easily able to download my photos everywhere I went abroad, email them home and keep the family suitably jealous with evidence of my jaunts to rain-forests and chocolate factories, and more rain-forests and chocolate tastings, and even more rain-forests (for the record, I am so over the rain-forest. Truly.) Anyway, it was easy - my computer at work there, internet cafés friends' laptops - all easily handled my downloads without any bother. Photos downloaded can either be still kept on your camera too (for when you get bored on a train and need something to look at) or deleted en masse (supremely useful for when, like me, you have several thousand on there that you don't want to click through and delete individually. You can also choose which ones to download each time (perhaps only the new ones you've taken, not ones from a few months back you still want to look at on your camera, for example) so you can customize your downloads and subsequent deletions. Hurrah.

DURABILITY

The camera came with a 1 year manufacturer's warranty which I have not needed to call upon. I am very happy with the way the camera has lasted, and it continues to work as well as did when I initially got it. This is despite the few months it spent switching from rain-forest to beach and back to rain-forest, and also despite the occasional splash of seawater it took. As I suspected, the inevitable day of dropping came, and the camera slipped out of my hands somewhere in the Olympic Park….and bounced on the grass. I picked it up and couldn't find so much as a scratch upon it. So far so good. A few weeks later, it fell again, and this time showed evidence of my careless handling. The underside of the camera where you fit the batteries now had a scratch across it and, perhaps more crucially, was slightly ajar. This was 6 months ago, and although the area will still not remain closed, no matter how much I coax it, the incident has had no detrimental effect on the quality of the snaps produced. It looks a bit funny, and others taking photos for me always seem a little cautious, but the vital part - its photo-taking abilities - has not been compromised. I don't fault the camera for splitting in this way as I'm not the most careful person in the world, and it's not the first camera that has suffered as a result. If anything, I commend it for its durability in coping with whatever I throw at it, or throw it at as the case may be.

The camera runs on 2 x AA batteries which seem to last a long time. However I do not feel the rechargable batteries and charger I bought with the camera are as good, and would therefore recommend you stick to standard Duracel or similar. One helpful thing is the slight 'whizz...ding' you get when you switch on the camera, and the 'phat' you get when you switch it off - just enough to hear if you accidentally turn it on/off, this saves battery power you might waste if you didn't realise what you'd done.

FINAL WORD

This is my first venture into the foray of digital photography and I am supremely impressed. I now have a few dozen albums of beautiful photos that were no hassle at all to generate, at very little cost (the camera, that is, my trip was slightly more). This camera is perfect for me because it is simple enough to be able to use immediately without wasting valuable time reading handbooks, but is sophisticated enough to produce good quality shots that will be the prompt for many happy memories for years to come. I have no need for the extras some may feel it is lacking (a view-finder for those who can't get their head around screens, for example, or a higher megapix rating) and therefore can award it nothing less than full marks. If only all techy gadgets were this user friendly, durable and down-right adorable.

This camera's full specs can be found at:

http://www.vivitar.co.uk/cameras/3megapixel/vivicam3785/
 

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