Vivitar ViviCam 3935

...By the same reasoning, a Vivitar digicam should be OK, as Vivitar have a long history of making decent lenses for 35mm SLR's. Of course it's difficult to be sure in these days of globalisation, and sometimes you just have to hope that a company's sense of pride will prevent them from selling a naff product with their name on it. As you will see later, Vivitar have a bit of work to do here, and the fact that the same camera is available with both ...
...Having said all this, the Vivitar consumes more power than most, but as long as you are prepared, it's livable with.

Despite my misgivings (and I did ultimately send it back) there's a lot to like about the Vivitar - it feels right in the hand and the controls are well thought out. It has most of things you might want, and not much you'll never need. Whatever you buy will be a compromise of some sort - even with money-no-object, you're ... more

My general advice to people shopping for a digital camera is to go to an established camera maker (Pentax, Canon, Olympus, Nikon, etc.) as any camera is only as good as its optics, and they already know how to do that. There are some honourable exceptions, however: the gorgeous Panasonic Lumix cameras have Leica lenses, some upmarket Sonys use Zeiss, and HP usually buy in their lenses from Pentax or Fuji. By the same reasoning, a Vivitar digicam should be OK, as Vivitar have a long history of making decent lenses for 35mm SLR's. Of course it's difficult to be sure in these days of globalisation, and sometimes you just have to hope that a company's sense of pride will prevent them from selling a naff product with their name on it. As you will see later, Vivitar have a bit of work to do here, and the fact that the same camera is available with both Trust and Praktica badges on it lends a clue as to its anonymous Chinese origins.

If you Google around for reviews on this model, the most common complaint you will see is that it eats batteries. The truth is that ALL digicams eat batteries, because that's the way they're made, and the problem is usually solved with a pair of high capacity (2000mAh+) rechargeables. Being small, this camera takes two, so buy four and a charger, and you'll have a spare set as well. The camera manufacturers shoot themselves in both feet here by invariably putting a set of Duracells or similar in the box. These will last a good ten minutes (hence the criticism) - throw them away and buy rechargeables!

The second thing you have to know is that using the LCD display doubles (at least) the power consumption. This is also true of all other digicams, so turn it off unless you really need it - just press the OK button twice to do this. You can then use the optical viewfinder, which is what you should be doing anyway to frame most shots. It's much easier to track a moving subject that way, too. The corollary to this is not to buy a camera without a separate viewfinder - some of these are electronic, which is a mixed blessing, but better than LCD-only by a long way, IMHO.

Having said all this, the Vivitar consumes more power than most, but as long as you are prepared, it's livable with.

Despite my misgivings (and I did ultimately send it back) there's a lot to like about the Vivitar - it feels right in the hand and the controls are well thought out. It has most of things you might want, and not much you'll never need. Whatever you buy will be a compromise of some sort - even with money-no-object, you're unlikely to find something with all the bells and whistles and still be able to fit it in your pocket. Indeed, I already have an HP 850, which is a large camera with a long zoom that takes excellent pictures, but I don't take it everywhere because it's too damn big!

Those of you who read the photo mags and web reviews will probably be familiar with the slightly sniffy criticism of most compact cameras that they rarely allow much in the way of manual adjustment. Well, I'm a camera buff, and I don't mind a bit! I'm old enough to remember when you had no option but to do everything manually, and you don't see cameras of that vintage flying off the shelves. These are the same people who turned their noses up at autofocus when it first appeared on 35mm cameras, but you compare the standard of sports photography 30 years ago with what appears in papers and magazines now, and tell me who focuses manually any more? Press photographers love automatic cameras, because they can concentrate on getting the killer shot…

As it happens, the Vivitar does have a (M)anual position on its mode dial, which allows fine adjustment of some otherwise automatic settings, but seeing as the camera gets exposures right nearly all the time, it's probably only there to satisfy the critics. The only normal exception I would admit is for compositions where the subject is unusually lit, in which case you might want to increase or decrease the exposure, if you know what you're doing, or to use spot metering, if you're not so sure. The camera can do both.

The mode dial is another thing I like. A lot of cameras now rely heavily on their LCD displays and a plethora of menus, but if you want to select, say, macro mode, it's a lot quicker (and easier to remember) to turn a dial one or two clicks. In the middle of the mode dial there is a button for taking movies. This is another good idea, as it means you can take a short film clip at a moment's notice - just press it and you are filming. You have to press it again to stop, which is something I only learned after shooting my kitchen table for five minutes, i.e. until my memory card was full.

There is also a separate Delete button below the display, which is not a particular rarity, but a useful facility nonetheless - on some cameras you have to do it via yet another menu.

Normal shooting is reasonably quick - about half a second for the focus to lock (in good light) and about half that for the shutter to click when you push the button home. It then takes 2-3 seconds to write the image before you can take another shot. There is no continuous or burst mode, so it's probably not the best choice for sports photography. Better than some, though, and good enough for most everyday use.

The macro mode allows you to get up to about eight inches away, and this is one time it is better to use the LCD as a viewfinder, and it will give you a better idea of what's in focus (the depth of field is always limited in close-ups, so getting too close will make things very fuzzy) as well as eliminating parallax error.

The main selling point of the camera will be the fact that it has five million pixels, which should be enough to make prints up to A3, but of course, this ain't necessarily so. To be blunt, my HP camera has one million fewer pixels and takes better pictures. It's not that the Vivitar's are bad - indeed, they are nicely saturated and well exposed, but it compresses them too much (even on the 'best' setting) and they appear a bit soft, which is probably to disguise the roughness that would otherwise be apparent from the compression.

This is where most cameras stand or fall - a first-class 3 megapixel camera, such as a Canon* A75 or the new A510 will produce pictures that are as good, or better than, a cheap 5 megapixel compact like the Vivitar. This is not to rubbish the Vivitar, but to put things in perspective, as cameras are largely sold on pixel count, which is not the whole story.

(*substitute your favourite Nikon, Olympus, etc. - the same applies).

What finally spoiled the show was the dead pixel count. The CCD, which is the bit of a digital camera that substitutes for the film, is an incredibly precise bit of silicon that has all five million pixels on its surface (less than a square centimetre) so it's not too surprising when some of them don't work. There is a fairly large reject rate during manufacture, and camera makers are usually at pains to select the better ones, which probably isn't that easy (i.e. it costs money). In practice, one or two dead pixels are livable with, and often go unnoticed, as they usually only show if you're in the habit of photographing large black things, which I sometimes do, sad as it may seem. The Vivitar had a lot of dead pixels, which made it unacceptable to me, so back it had to go. I've no idea if mine was typical, but I suspect that they all have a few, and as neither of my other cameras has any, I conclude that it's a combination of brand, quality control and price. In other words, as in so many things, you get what you pay for.

The Vivitar is a nice, cobby little camera that feels right, but it falls down in the one area that really matters: picture quality. Which is a shame.
 

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