Vivitar ViviCam 3675

Picked up the Vivitar ViviCam 3675 digital camera from TigerDirect.com very cheap. $99 after rebates and it included a Lexmark P700 photo printer with media bay. True the ink is pricey, but I figure it was a free printer and media reader.

In use it does a nice job in a portrait or still setting. The "shutter" delay is over 2 seconds, and if you are doing any action it may as well be a week. You find yourself trying to predict every shot and then still missing over half of them.

The Optical 3x zoom is very nice with an actuating lever, not just a button. Quite smooth and easy to get the correct framing on a zoom (on still life type shots). Being a 3.3 Megapixel camera you can afford to be a little wide on the action shots and then crop. Plenty of pixels to pick from. The step to the digital zoom should have a setting to just turn it off. When you are at 3x optical if you are not careful you end up toggleing in and out of digital zoom to find 3x optical.

The view screen is very coarse and quite small. Hard to review a picture in that screen. The settings are all done from this screen and the button/joystick is a little tempermental and overly sensitive.

Battery life is rather poor, especially with AA alkaline. Using high capacity MH it is better and rechargable, albeit out of the camera. Falling back to alkaline in emergency is a nice feature. Flash must have a guide number of 2. Really poor range. The autofocus is fast and accurate in normal use.

The case for this camera is an afterthought leftover from some other product. Very cheap construction and look. The camera is almost the size of a Vivitar 35mm rangefinder camera. It probably will not fit in a pocket unless you happen to wear military clothes with pockets large enough to hide your grenades and 9mm in.

Would I buy it again? For the price, yep. I don't worry too much about it being damaged since it is fairly cheap. Give me another 10 months to make it a year and we will see if it still functions.