Vivicam 20

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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.
vivcam test

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.

139 thoughts on “Vivicam 20”

  5. How do I get this bloody vivcam 10 to work. XP says it installed, I ran the exe twice like it says on the vivtar web­site, bt the second time always unin­stalls it. Usu­ally USB cam­eras show up as an extra drive but when I go into my com­puter there is no extra drive, yet everything in device man­ager says unit works properly…so what the hell??

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  6. I bought a vivicam20 almost a year ago never had a prob­lem with it till now. I have 41 pic­tures on it but when i go to get my pics my com­puters doesn’t read the cam­era tell me to make sure it’s con­nec­ted, even thou it is also i can web cam with it just can’t get my pics of it
    any ideas to help would be great thanks

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  8. Hi Jon, and John,
    I have today emailed the web­mas­ter at Vivitar.com to let him know that the site is not work­ing.
    I’ll let you know when I get a reply.

    Mike

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  10. hey i think I can help with the viv cam 10 and 20.I down loaded the latest drivers from http://www.vivitar.com and then it will upgrade the driver sys­tem .You need to use arc­soft to down load the pic­tures it is the prgram that comes with the install driver.

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  11. Can someone please tell me if they have a copy of an instruc­tion manual for a vivicam.10. The web­site has been down for so long I am begin­ning to won­der if its ever going to work again.. Thanks

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  16. i recieved a viv­itar — vivicam:10 B from some friends of mine awhile ago I’ve only taken pic­tures w/ it (long story) my prob­lem???? inever rec’d the soft­ware or any­thing else iwas won­der­ing if any­one has the soft­ware installer that i need to retrieve (or down­load) my pic­tures. i would appre­ci­ate the share or ????, info. thanks ron

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  18. Mike, did you try that link? It appar­ently has been dead for some time! Send people to driver­guide, and sug­gest they check earlier posts, such as #95.

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  20. i just wasn’t sure if every­one not­cied
    that the link for the soft­ware for the vivicam 20 doesn’t work
    not even dir­ectly off the site
    but you can down­load the soft­ware for the vivicam 10
    and it will work.
    someone else might have poin­ted this out, i didn’t check.
    but i hope every­one knows now.

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  21. mike
    i have a viv­itar vivicam .10 B when my friend gave it to me he for­got to give me the installer soft­ware, please help!Any sug­ges­tions? or can you hook me up?
    thanks.

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  23. hey phil i found this site using google because i had trouble get­ting the pic­tures off the cam­era and into the com­puter. I was able to import them using TWAIN in Pho­toshop and XnView. How­ever Google’s Picasa pro­gram worked the best.
    http://picasa.google.com/

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  25. I need to return my VIVICAM 10, where can I get an RMA# to send in my cam­era. How long will it take you to fix?

    Can I still have my pic­tures after you fix it?

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  26. Jose,

    Does this look like the Viv­itar site? You even included a link to the Viv­itar site so you pre­sum­ably know of it.

    Why ask your ques­tions here? Why not ask Vivitar?

    Mike

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  27. I sent my com­puter to be repaired , the 98 rein­stalled and so lost the vivicam 20 soft­ware CD; I have pic­tures in the cam­era but can’t because I don’t have the CD .. is there some­where where I can get a free dow­load of that soft­ware?
    Thanks in advance for your help.

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  31. alri!!! i lost me disc 2 install d cam­era 2 my com­puter!!! nd now i cnt get d pic­tures on!!! is der ne otha way i can pu d pic­tures on wi ou d disc??? wb xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

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  38. When you find these links out of date you may get lucky and find they are still extant at Inter­net Archive DOT org. I was able to go back in one case to 2003.
    Just copy the link to the search box on the “Way Back Machine”. The con­tent on the pages is often avail­able too.
    My ViviCam 20 i got in a thrift store for $3 dol­lars but the flash doesn’t work and while it shows up on my sys­tem pro­filer neither iPhoto or Mac­Cam recog­nize it so I can only see it’s baud, model and man­u­fac­turer num­ber.
    Thanks for the links com­ments and help.

    Best Wishes
    Drake

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