I’ve played about a little with my new cam­era a Viv­itar Vivicam 20. For it’s price (sub £40), it’s not too bad.

The image qual­ity seems to be very light depend­ent. It has four dif­fer­ent expos­ure set­tings: Out­door dull (the default), out­door sunny, indoor bright, and indoor dark. I could find very little dif­fer­ence between them in my ini­tial exper­i­ments. It also has a built in auto­matic flash. The flash is extremely bright over the dis­tance it cov­ers; 0.8 to 1.5 metres with 1.0 — 1.2 metres described as ‘best’. The flash doesn’t func­tion in macro mode.

Macro mode didn’t seem to make any dif­fer­ence in my simple tests. The manual claims it only works over 25 to 30 cm, thats a very small range!. I’ll have to do some more formal tests, most of the pic­tures I took in macro mode were out of focus. How­ever my judge­ment of dis­tances is quite poor so I’ll have to try some with a tape meas­ure

The con­trols are a little strange; you press the mode but­ton which then cycles through, VGA, CIF, out­door dull, out­door sunny, indoor bright, indoor dark, flash on, flash off, con­tin­ous cap­ture, delete all pic­tures, delete last pic­ture, self timer. Each press is accom­pan­ied by a loud beep. When you get to the mode you want, you press the select but­ton for a short while, this beeps twice and the mode is selec­ted. If you don’t press select for long enough it can­cels the mode selec­tion and you have to start again.

Annoy­ingly, when it switches itself off (after 60 seconds of inactiv­ity) it for­gets your set­tings

The 8MB of internal memory seems to be plenty. I’ve man­aged to get 71 VGA pic­tures before it filled. At which point the cam­era beeps about once per second until it switches itself off.

I’ve also tried the web­cam mode which worked OK, but again suf­fers from low light con­di­tions. I’ve not tried the self timer or the con­tinu­ous mode. When I’ve had a play with these two func­tions, I’ll report some more.

I’ve uploaded an album of test images (noth­ing spe­cial) to the gal­lery. Click on the image to go there.

I’ve not used the sup­plied soft­ware other than very briefly. It uses a non-standard inter­face, that I couldn’t really fig­ure out. I’ve only used it to down­load pic­tures from the cam­era. I’ve not tried any of the image edit­ing func­tions. I’m quite happy using Paint­shop Pro to down­load the images. As I men­tioned before, I think I’m get­ting them uncom­pressed that way.