I finally man­aged to find myself a cheap digital camera!

I got myself a Viv­itar Vivicam 20

• 640 x 480 Resolution
• PC Video cam­era mode (13 fps CIF)
• Focus Free
• Auto Flash
• 8 MB Internal Memory
• LCD Status display
• USB Con­nectiv­ity
• Optical view­finder
• Auto white bal­ance and auto exposure
• 10 second self-timer and tri­pod socket
• Auto power-off (2 minutes)

The internal memory is Flash so it shouldn’t lose any pic­tures if the bat­ter­ies fail, unlike some mod­els in this price range. I’ve not played with it extens­ively yet, but I have had it work­ing as a web­cam. I’ll take it to work with me tomor­row and get some day­light pictures.

It claims it keeps the images as BMPs which means no com­pres­sion. Not good for fit­ting many images on the internal memory, but as the qual­ity is not that good to start with it’ll help. Whilst the sup­plied soft­ware, Arcsoft’s Pho­toIm­pres­sion 3, saves to disk as JPEG, I can trans­fer dir­ectly from the cam­era into Paint­shop Pro, pre­sum­ably uncompressed.

(click for lar­ger image)

More when I’ve had a play.