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”

  6. Have a prob­lem get­ting the pic­tures from cam­era to PC– TWAIn error– scan­ner not con­nec­ted. I see the drivers, but in the device man­ager– when I click on Still cam– the sec­tion at the bot­tom Status– says device not con­nec­ted. I have unin­stalled the soft­ware and rein­stalled, and used a sec PC, and down­loaded the drivers fronm the web– any work arounds?

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  9. To Meredith –
    If you keep hit­ting the mode but­ton, you get to a pic­ture that looks like a stack of pic­ture frames. That puts you into AVI mode. The cam­era will take a 320 x 240 pic­ture, about 3 per second. If you pull up the res­ults with the AVI soft­ware, it will con­vert it to a movie.

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  10. I pur­chased a Vivicam 20 $49.00 at Wal Mart,
    The pic­tures are pretty light depend­ant but after about six months of using the cam I can get some nice snaps, the web-cam fea­ture is a little less enjoy­able, the camera’s short field of view makes it dif­fi­cult to be seen unless you are sit­ting dir­ectly in front of the cam­era, or; place it on a tri-pod and about six feet (2m) away.
    The flash seems to be way too much or not enough, nat­ural light is the best, but the pur­chase of “this” cam­era was due to the flash fea­ture that seems to be much less of a value in the long run.
    The bat­ter­ies last a long time, and it’s small size and gen­eraly good pic­ture qual­ity makes it a great cam to carry in the jaket pocket, push the power but­ton and take the pic..I like that fea­ture a lot.
    The mini tri-pod is not heavy enough to over­come the stiff­ness of the USB cable that comes with the cam­era, and the cable should be longer for web cam users.

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  11. I own a vivcam 20, pruchased at Wal­mart for $0 USD. Up till now i have been happy with the qual­ity vs the price. I just put in a fresh pair of bat­ter­ies, Ener­gizer E2, that replaced stand­ard dur­a­cell. Now i can get the flash to charge up under any of the light set­tings. Could it be the bat­ter­ies? Or could there be a worse prob­lem at hand?

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  12. Hi,
    You can quickly determ­ine whether it is the bat­ter­ies by swap­ping in another fresh pair of Duracel’s. If the flash works with those, then your Energizer’s aren’t strong enough. If it still doesn’t, then I do think you have a more ser­i­ous prob­lem. :-(

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  13. I have a vivicam.10, and when I try to use it it comes up with no CIF image to cre­ate AVI maker. I have the insal­la­tion cd and that does’nt even work. The AVI maker has no com­pat­ib­il­ity for Win­dows XP. I’m not to impressed about the whole thing, So I would like some imfo on what to do. Thank You, Clara Leonard

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  14. Clara,
    I’m sorry but I do not know how to fix your prob­lem. Someone else had an earlier com­ment with a sim­ilar prob­lem. Per­haps their answer will help you.

    By the way, I do not make or sell Viva­cam cam­eras, nor sup­port them in any way; I happened to own a Vivicam 20 and write about it here.
    Mike

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  17. Updated my OS to XP Pro. Down­loaded XP drivers from Vivitar.com. When I plug in my vivicam 20 the PC restarts! If I find an answer to the XP driver prob­lem, I will post another note.
    John

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  19. I’ve had this cam­era for a few months now. You really have to play around with the set­tings to fig­ure out how to get the best pic­ture. I have to say, I think my recent pho­tos came out a lot bet­ter than the ones in the gal­lery. I really like the fea­ture that lets you take close-up pic­tures. It worked great when pho­to­graph­ing my dad’s antique bottles. This cam­era is well wortht the price in my opinion.

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  20. I cna’t get mine to con­nect I don’t know where to find an adapter I hate this cam­era! Just kid­ding I wish I could see my daugth­ers cheer­lead­ing debout..but it’s locked in this thing HELP

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  24. i have a prob­lem! when i try to install the driver for my vivicam 20, i always get an error. it says “This pro­gram has per­formed an illegal oper­a­tion and will be shut down.” i tried down­load­ing the driver from the inter­net but the same thing hap­pens, i get the same error. any­one know what i can do to get my driver to install??

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  28. Hi, Im brazilian and I was read­ing your site “blog” and see that you have the vivicam, My vivicam was bought in Ger­many and I cant install in my com­puter because cdrom was broken…
    Can you send me a driver (install) of Vivicam — Viv­itar? Please.
    Sorry my eng­lish, I learn­ing…
    I liked so much of your “blog” Visit my blog too: http://www.cintianegrini.blig.ig.com.br
    Bye

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  29. I’m hav­ing trouble get­ting the pho­tos from cam to PC…keep get­ting “TWAIN driver error..scanner may not be con­nec­ted.” I tried unin­stalling the entire soft­ware and rein­stalling with no luck. I noticed someone had the same prob­lem back in Dec. of 2002 but did not find an answer to his prob­lem. Can any­one help?

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  30. I too have the same prob­lem as Julie,loaded drivers and every time You try to access the cam­era acd­see says there is a twain driver error…I have noticed how­ever that when the cam­era is plugged to the com­puter it shows up as a remov­able media and can be nav­ig­ated to from My Com­puter and the files manip­u­lated from there.Open to sug­ges­tions but why won’t the cam­era be recog­nized by the twain driver?

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  31. Thanks for your quick response, Mat. Actu­ally, i am not hav­ing the prob­lem with my cam­era at home. The pho­tos trans­fer fine. But i have a friend who has the same cam­era and we keep get­ting that TWAIN driver error mes­sage on his PC. I just don’t under­stand it. Hope­fully someone will come up with the resolution.

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  32. By the way, Mat. I brought my friend’s cam­era and inter­face cord home with me and down­loaded his images with no prob­lem on my PC. It’s def­in­itely soft­ware related.

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  33. Every time I take pics with my vivicam 20, I upload them to the pc and the col­ors are all wrong, almost like blurred or some­thing. I even went to viv­itars web­site and redown­loaded drivers and still the same crapppy pics.

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  34. I pur­chased vivicam20 when try­ing to install soft­ware comes up with error on kernel32.dll and com­puter freezes. any sug­ges­tions why this occurs? pc oper­ates on win­dows me

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  35. Seems as if I might have the same prob­lems some oth­ers have had, Once bat­ter­ies were changed flash quit work­ing,
    and I have pur­chase a new pc and can­not for the life of
    me find the soft­ware, can you help please.
    Thank,
    Earl

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  36. Mike,
    I have the same prob­lem as some oth­ers, Once new bat­ter­ies were put in the flash quit, and I need to find soft­ware, pur­chased a new pc and can­not find soft­ware. Appre­ci­ate any help you can give.
    Thanks,
    Earl

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  38. Mike,
    I down­loaded the driver from vivicam web­site. They have only the driver, but no Arc­soft util­ity there. Is there a way to trans­fer pic­tures to PC without the utilities?

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  43. I down­loaded the Twain driver for the vivicam 10 and 20 from the viv­itar web site and I doesn’t seem to work, if any­one could give me some advice it would be greatly appre­ci­ated, thanks. I have also con­tac­ted Vivitar,and am await­ing a reply.

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  44. Dear,
    I’ve vivicam-20 but I lost its soft­ware a few months ago.Now I can’t get it in local market.But I need it very soon.So I need help from any­body who has vivicam-20 software.

    Thank­ing

    Topon Tigga

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  46. Salut j’ai acheté le vivicam 20 mais je n’arrive pas à installer les drivers on me dit
    numero d’erreur 0×80070725
    ver­sion incom­pat­ible de la RPC
    install­a­tion va main­ten­ant se terminer

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  47. If you’re mak­ing an AVI, the images in the cam­era have to be in CIF format, which is 352×288 pixels. If you are mak­ing an AVI using single shots you’ve taken, then be sure to switch the format to CIF before you shoot the pics: switch on, press Mode twice and then Select. This could be why some people are get­ting the ‘no CIF’ message.

    If you select the mul­tiple image set­ting (press Mode nine times then Select) the cam­era shoots them in CIF mode automatically.

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  48. here is aprob­lem i havent ever heard of. i got my cam­era one year and one month ago. it worked great till this month. then i went to put bat­ter­ies in and it acts like i never put them in it doesnt power up at all. i checked for erot­ion or any other visual prob­lems and noth­ing. i plug it in to the pc and i can work it from there but only so many func­tions are pos­sible with the util­it­ies on pc. what could cause this? i havent mis­sused this cam­era at all. i have tried 3 dif­fer­ent brands of bat­ter­ies so far. still nothing.

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  49. i just got the viva­cam 20 and i cant erase the pho­tos on it, the memory if full with an amaz­ing 83 pics, i like the cam­era, good pic­tures and ok qual­ity but the instruc­tions are in french and i cant fig­ure out how to erase the photos…help please!!!

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  51. The XP Twain driver from the web­site for the Vivicam 10 does not work under Win­dows XP. While the cam­era is detec­ted as a Plug and Play USB mass stor­age device (Sun­plus SPCA533) and can be accessed as a drive by XP, the Twain driver does not load or run in any applic­a­tion. Fur­ther, the install­a­tion the device in “Ima­ging Devices” as both a single mode and dual mode DSC cam­era, as stated in the doc­u­ment­a­tion, never occurs after soft­ware installation.

    The broken XP drivers need to be fixed by Viv­itar. I have worked with 5 other digital cam­eras extens­ively and have never, ever had the kind of soft­ware prob­lems I have with this one. The soft­ware is junk.

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  52. We just got a Vivicam 10 for our youth group. Took pic­tures fine but made the mis­take of wait­ing overnight to upload. The cam­era didn’t turn on when I went to upload. The only solu­tion was to take the bat­ter­ies out and rein­sert which caused me to loose pic­tures that can’t be replaced. Is any­one else hav­ing this problem?

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  53. Dave, I think this is a con­sequence of the Vivcam 10 (and 20) not hav­ing flash memory to store the pic­tures. They need a bat­tery sup­ply to con­tinue to store them. I guess the les­son learned is to upload your pic­tures at the first opportunity.

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  57. I pur­chased a Vivicam 20 sev­eral months back and have been so dis­ap­poin­ted with it…I think that is a piece of junk.
    The pic­tures are weird look­ing — any­thing “red” comes out green and they are so grainy look­ing no mat­ter what mode it’s in. The flash is so bright it lit­er­ally washes out the sub­ject to a “white blobb”. How many mega pixels is this cam­era.
    For example: I am look­ing at one that is a Canon 300 series with 3.2 megs marked on the front. What would this Vivicam 20 com­pare to ??? .2 megs???

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  58. does any­body know where i can get a copy of the soft­ware for vivicam 20,as i lost mine mov­ing house but cant go retrieve it due to ex,shes prob­bably thrown it noe anyhow.any help on this would be much appreciated.thanks

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  60. is there any­way to be able to down­load the whole pro­gram again?..I no longer have the disc..& now it says that the usb port can not be found..any help would be appreciated

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  63. bought a vivicam 20 a year ago and am pleased with it so far but one of my kids lost the soft­ware disc for it so i can no longer retrieve the pics is the some­way i can down­load s/ware from a site??

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  64. i have a vivicam 10, and I lost my soft­ware and have down­loaded AVI maker but it says there is no cif image…I just want to upload my pic­tures to look at them, what pro­gram should I go onto/or down­load to upload pic­tures from a vivicam 10?

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  65. Hi
    I need to install the soft­ware into my com­puter so that I can view my pic­tures that I took with my Vivi Cam 10, but the thing is I do not have the cd to install. PLese Help!

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  66. I need to install the soft­ware into my com­puter so that I can view my pic­tures that I took with my Vivi Cam 10, but the thing is I do not have the cd to install. PLese Help!

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  67. So is there a soft­ware down­load out there or not. Most cam­eras you can just con­nect and view via the inter­net. But not vivicam. Please R.S.V.P.

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  68. got one of these vivicam 20 myself it was a good pic­ture qual­ity good enough for me any­way but !!!! i lost the disc wot you get with it to enable you to put your pics on pc ive looked for one on the viv­itar site and other places and none seen to work im try­ing to get hold of a ori­ginal disc but hav­ing no luck hope you or someone can help thanks and kind regards neil

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  69. OK, I have had the same prob­lem where the com­puter is com­plain­ing about not hav­ing a “CIF image to cre­ate AVI”. On the CD that comes with the cam­era is the AVI maker soft­ware which is not in the driver down­load page. THis is what you need to do

    1) Down­load both drivers from the vivicar web­site for the vivicam.

    2) Install a second photo pro­cessing soft­ware. I used Stu­di­oline Photo Basic which was a free down­load from download.com

    3) Go to File –> Import –> Vivicam

    That will allow you to pull the pics even in XP. Took me a while to fig­ure out so I hope I have saved you some time.

    Joe

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  70. Hi Joe:
    Your advice was timely, I am hav­ing the XP/no CIF File prob­lem — but I do not under­stand Step 3, go to File Import Vivicam. Do you have any more spe­cific advice on how to make this work after installing both the down­loads? I am get­ting ready to give up on the camera.

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  71. Hi,
    Thanks for the 411 on these vivcam 10 dig cams.The one about wasted bat­ter­ies and then not being able to get them on the com­puter is a les­son I would have found out the hard way. Thanks to some of you out there I won’t have to loose any shots. But I do have a prob­lem maybe you can help..“how do you get the mem icon to stop flashing?”..I know it’s prob­ably real easy but I can’t find my instruc­tions duh!! I can’t remem­ber how the mem even works LOL. Thanks for any input! Lady Wil­low Dragon

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  73. The bat­tery bay keeps pop­ping open and los­ing all of my work.…..I’m hol­d­ong it together with sur­gical tape. It’s not that big a deal but $49 is $49.

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  74. I lost my soft­ware and have down­loaded AVI maker but it says there is no cif image…I just want to upload my pic­tures to look at them, what pro­gram should I go onto/or down­load to upload pic­tures from a vivicam 10?

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  75. Hey, just boaght a viv­itar 3826 I can’t use it with my Win­dows xp because the soft­ware provided with the unit does not provide a driver for xp and my xp will not provide one. We are in Fort Laud­er­dale FL and there is no way of cor­rect­ing this prob­lem at
    point of pur­chase because we are in the throws of a power­full her­icane as I write you this.We need to use this cam­ora, Thanks.

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  76. Hey,
    I bought vivicam-20 about 1 year ago and i got a new comp and I lost my CD :( , and now i don‘t know what to do, could someone send me some files for the instal­a­tion please,
    Thank you

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  77. Here’s some help for most of you:
    1. The AVI down­load is an applic­a­tion that con­verts a file cre­ated on the V10 or V20 to an AVI file. The web­site no longer has the Arc­Soft soft­ware used for off-loading images from the camera.

    2. To take movies (short clips) you need to set the cam­era into movie mode. (The manual on the web­site DOES include instruc­tions for set­ting the cam­era in the ver­i­ous modes.)

    3. Although the off-load (and image view­ing) soft­ware is not avail­able on the web­site, you CAN use just about any other photo edit­ing soft­ware that imports from TWAIN devices. Pho­toshop, Coral Draw, are examples. You DO need to have the driver installed for them to func­tion in down­load mode. That driver IS avail­able on the site. Also, you have to reboot after run­ning the driver install pro­gram in order that the image soft­ware will recog­nize the camera.

    4. To down­load, plug the cable into the cam­era and the computer’s USB port. The cable is just an “A” to “A” USB cable. They are a little hard to find, but they are NOT pro­pri­et­ary. I bought one on the inter­net for $6. They have the same con­nector on both ends; the same con­nector that you plug into the back of your com­puter in the USB port. You ALSO need to set the cam­era into down­load mode as I recall.

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  78. just bought a viv­itar 3350vvicam for 19.97 @walmart
    cant get a pic­ture to take read all the instruc­tions
    have all soft­ware down­load and drivers all work­ing ok
    usb and all. 26 pic show­ing light­ing all ok bat­ter­ies all
    ok but pic wont take dong everh=ything I can think of to do
    even chan­ging bat­ter­ies that came with unit. still did not help
    the camerea even beeps all modes work­ing fol­low­ing all instruc­tions got
    it to take on pic but had to shot it dir­ectly at the lamp at diret light.
    inside the house at a lamp­shade why is this? read your web­site lites?

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  79. i need your help. i have a vivicam 20 that my hus­band for­got to take with him when he left me, and i have no soft­ware, how can i get it.. i also need the manual.. tried to dowen­load it, but was in com­puter jar­gon, but i really need the soft ware.. thanks.. is there any­one who could email it to me.. at imjoius@hotmail.com or iamjoyous2003@yahoo.co,

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  80. Bought vivicam 10 and get viaicam.… has caused an error and will now shut dow rundll34.… and it wont click off, reloaded my win­dows me and still the soft­ware wont load, I even dow­loaded from the vivtar site and still same prob­lem, dont know what to do. any help would be great, run­ning on win­dows me and on a pen­tium 2 com­paq deskpro com­puter. thank-you, Duane.

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  81. I Got a Vivicam 20 at a flee mar­ket. There was noth­ing with it. I dop­wn­loaded a driver and got a USB cord from a dealel. If you don’t know USB cables ask for an A to A. I didn’t know this. All of my reg­u­lar pic­ture soft­ware works well with it. I don’t know any­thing about it. Only what I have picked up here. I am hav­ing the same bat­tery prob­lems. Changed bat­terys and no flash. You must use the long life kind.
    Sonny Patty
    Jack­son­ville, Arkansas.

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  82. hi all

    i have a vivcam 20 and i got the drivers for it too but i dont think it works on XP, i cant get
    it to work on it any­way any­one that needs the drivers for it please e-mail me i might be able
    help you i dont know yet if you got yahoo i am lady_jaynne_ga and my e-mail is
    lady_jaynne@hotmail.com. good luck to you all i got to buy mine back from a freind that i sold
    it too because it wont work on Xp but if i found some­thing on this i will let every­one here know.

    take care all and have a great day
    sara

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  83. WOW I have this cam­era Viv­itar 3301 1.3 mega­pixle– and I gotta say it SUUUUCKS
    really bad. In this day and age you should at least be able to simply plug the cam­era in and at least
    have one pro­gram open the pic­tures. Not the case. The CD that Viv­itar sent with the cam­era has
    a big hole in it. Great! Of course it doesn’t work. Again this cam­era sucks the back­side of
    of a goffer.

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  87. I have Vivicam 20 cam­era. I have a scratched up cd, so I need the twain drivers for it. I down­loaded from Vivtar site and oth­ers but it doesn’t to work. It say “Invalid page fault in kernel386.exe . . ” So, can any­one send me the drivers for vivcam 10 and 20? V1.90 or V1.92. And then tell me where and how to install it?
    Thank You so much!
    Sin­cerely,
    Mary Green

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  90. Well I have a vivitar.20 cam­era and I cant find the soft­ware i need to put it on my new pc so im unable to see the pic­tures i have taken on it .… Can someone email me the soft­ware or tell me where i can get it .… please thanx — shannon–

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  91. I have the Vivicam.20 and I have down­loaded the Photo impres­sions and I have finally figured out how to work everything on the cam­era, how­ever, my prob­lem is when I hook the cam­era up to the com­puter it says that there are no pic­tures to down load. It seems like the cam­era isn’t stor­ing the pic­tures. I have tried every which way to take a pic­ture and have changes out the bat­ter­ies but noth­ing seems to work. Any suggestions?

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  93. i have a Vivicam 20, and i can take up to 79 pic­tures as it’s been my
    limit i’ve reached once, but i took the cam­era around with me to see if
    it would take any­more. it went up to 69 and wouldnt take any­more.
    when i got home i tryed put­ting them on the computer,they would not save
    on it and they wouldnt delete off my cam­era. now i have a cam­era with 69
    pics on it and i cant take any­more and i cant delete them. i want to know
    how to fix this or do i need to get another one ?

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  94. hey i’m look­ing for a soft­ware that sup­port the web­cam func­tion for my vivicam.10
    because the soft­ware that I found is only for the image edi­tion
    please if someone know a link or a inter­net page that provide this soft­ware send me
    to my e-mail carlosalbertogaona@hotmail.com

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  99. I got one of these (Cam 10) as a free­bie in a trade. It took a little bit to fig­ure out but the flash does still work when you change the bat­ter­ies, just it resets to being off. Use the mode but­ton to select the auto­matic flash sym­bol (A with a flash) and when it’s blink­ing press and hold down the select but­ton until the cam­era beeps. The “busy” light will blink for a few seconds while the flash charges, and you’re ready to go. The drivers can be down­loaded from Vivitar’s web site, just I wish they’d used a stand­ard cam­era USB cable, the A-A male cables are uncommon.

    Reply ↓

  100. Dear Mike!
    I have bought an vivicam 20 cam­era, but I lost the CD install­a­tion, could help me telling me how can I down­load the instal­a­tion.
    Regards

    Car­los Matamoros
    From Honduras.

    Reply ↓

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