Mother's day saw a gift for Mother - i.e. my darling wife - that was a little bit more than a bunch of flowers.
Being away from her for the day had made the conscience tender enough to suggest something a bit extra. Then there had been her gradual realisation that paying for reels of standard film to be developed after holidays, was mighty expensive. Finally, there had been those little experiments with my Fuji while on safari recently, that prompted the desire to enter the digital revolution.!
This Vivitar is a good starter off in that direction.
Price-wise these are available on the high street for around £60. They come complete with 2 AA batteries, 14mb of inbuilt memory, a carrying case, the cables and software to download to TV or PC, and a pretty good manual.
It has an oddity for a digital camera in that the focus is altered by a manual movement of the lens at the front - giving portrait or landscape options.!
Other than that, there are all the standard options that we have come to expect on modern digitals.
The 1.5" display can be altered for brightness, though even my poor sight could handle the factory set option. You can alter the EV setting so that the camera copes better with things like fluorescent tubes of different types. You can alter the settings for quality of image from the full 3 megapixels down the scale, if you want to get more photos on your memory. The other option is to use an SD card or an MMC card to give a lot more memory - say 512 MB.
You have three basic modes which are for picture taking, for movie taking and for playback. The flash can be kept off, or on automatically, or on with red-eye removal.
There is also a self-timer function, if you want to delay a picture and get in the frame yourself, and there is a 4x digital zoom to increase the image size.
That really is about it, and it produces perfectly good photos which you can store on the PC, print on your inkjet or delete if you are wise.!
I suggested this as a starter camera for someone starting in the digital mode. Reasons for this are the limitations of this camera. It has no optical zoom, and frankly the lens is not really Leica standard.! 3 MP sounded huge 3 years ago, but has been dwarfed by the most recent offerings from all the manufacturers. It uses ordinary Duracells or similar rather than being rechargeable - my preference is a camera that allows both or else has a long-life lithium cell.
What you need to know, you who will not join the digital revolution, is that this is a really compact camera that costs less than the price of purchase, developing and printing of 6 APS films.! - This is a good alternative - Thanks Index for a good mother's day present.!
How helpful would this review be to a person making a buying decision? Rating guidelines
I have a Vivitar (see my review), and it's certainly caused me to trust the brand name. I'd agree with the comment about using rechargeable batteries and a memory card, though- if it's anything like mine, it'll eat normal batteries for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and the included memory won't store as many pictures as you'd get out of a standard roll of film (at default quality).
bistro 25.03.2005 19:19
I echo Pat's comment, it certainly does beat a bunch of flowers! Cheers for the info! Mandy.xx
tekin21 25.03.2005 10:08
Lucky mother! Sounds like a nice little camera. Jane x
very helpful by (84%):
helpful by (16%):
