Vivitar ViviCam 3825

I bought the Vivitar ViviCam 3825 digital camera online during January 2006, and discovered it to be slightly bulkier than I expected. It's definitely not something you could carry around with you in your trouser pocket.

On initial inspection everything seems to be in a reasonably intuitive position. The menus are on a simple up down left right cursor, and once set, most options that you might want to change, depending on your environment, are on marked buttons on the outside. Mine came with a 64Mb SD card which I quickly swapped for a 256Mb card, which should enable me to store hundreds of photo's at a reasonable resolution.

One thing that shocked me was the apparent power consumption. However, after a little investigation I discovered that standard alkaline AA batteries cannot hold a high enough voltage for long enough, and therefore the camera dies while there is still a good charge in the batteries. Therefore, you must purchase rechargeable NiMh batteries with the camera. These are designed to hold a high voltage for far longer than standard batteries, and I have not had to change mine yet after about 4 hours of use. Otherwise you will be replacing standard batteries every 20 minutes or so.

Picture quality is good, but there is no noticeable delay between pressing the button and the camera taking a picture. Downloading to a PC is akin to taking data off a USB memory card, and it requires no driver as long as you use Windows 2000 or XP.

All things considered it's a good buy for the £75 I paid.

That last review I read is just not true. I bought my ViviCam 3825 at WalMart on sale for $125. It DID come with a memory card, although only a 16 meg one. In the highest resolution it will only hold 12-16 pics. Walmart also has a 128 meg memory stick for it for jsut $28, so I picked that up to. On the highest resolution it existimates that it will hold 96 pictures in jpeg format on that one... not too bad I say! so for about $150 I got a 4 megapixel Digicam with 144 megs of storage space.