Vivitar Vivicam 3705, my son's camera

Author's Rating:

Pros: my 2 year old can take photos with it, decent pictures

Cons: devours batteries, no optic zoom, poor design for card/battery input, bad in poor lighting

The Bottom Line: 
This is a good camera for basic photography, easy and sturdy enough for a child to use. It doesn't do well in poor lighting though and uses batteries up quickly.

Author's Review
Three Black Fridays ago while I was shopping for other people but still keeping my eye open for myself, I found this camera. My husband had a Sony digital camera and I noticed the Vivitar Vivicam 3705 on sale for $65, normally $130. I figured it'd be a good idea to have two digital cameras so we didn't have to share and picked it up.

This 3705 is a 3.3 mega pixel camera. It came with a USB cable, software, a user manual, a strap on the camera, as well as a velour pouch to carry the camera in. It came with an 8 or 16MB SD memory card. I bought a 128MB card as well.

Since purchasing this camera we have gotten rid of the Sony and upgraded my husband's camera to the Nikon D80 and I've upgraded to the Canon Powershot G6. However my 2 year old loves to use our cameras and isn't satisfied with toy ones, a homemade one I made or one that made sounds that we bought from the Disney Store. So we decided to give him the Vivicam 3705.

It is easy for him to turn on, on the back in the middle is an oval button for the power. To the left of that button is one for the menu. To the right of that is a Mode button. To the left of all of these is the viewfinder. My son has finally learned how to look out of this viewfinder to try to see what he is taking a picture of. However he prefers looking out of the LCD display.

When you power on the camera if the front lens covered is closed the LCD screen displays "Lens Cover Closed", although my son is 2 and can't read, this message reminds him to slide over the front cover all the way until it clicks slightly so he can see the display. There is a button on the camera to turn on or off the display. This will save batteries, but it tends to be on all the time for us. The display itself is a 1.5" color TFT LCD.

The camera allows you to take photos and short periods of video recording. Photos are saved in .jpg format, videos are saved in a .avi format. It also has a 4x digital zoom, but not an optical zoom unfortunately.

There are a few different settings for the range of focus. There is a macro setting for pictures in 21-36 inches away, a portrait setting for 3-6 feet, and a landscape setting for greater than 6 feet. These three settings are on the front of the camera when you slide a little bar into the choice position. The F number of the lens is 3.5.

So this little camera does take pretty decent photos. The first year we had it I used it a lot. Photos inside/in the dark don't really come out well though, even though it does have a flash (that you can have in auto mode or on or off). So this camera is really only recommended for outdoors, based on my experiences.

Menu options allow you to preview your photos and delete them from the card if you don't like them. Also there is a self timer options that last 10 seconds and then takes a picture. I've used that a few times.

The big problem I have with this camera is the way it eats up batteries. It takes 2 AAs and if I use camera off and on during a 3-4 hour outing the camera will be dead the next time I go to use it. And every time you take out the batteries you have to reset the date and time. So this happens quite frequently that I just leave the date as the default date (a date in 2003). I gave my son this camera and he isn't the best about turning it off and he was playing with it for less than 2 hours with fresh batteries before it was dead.

Also if you want to change the SD card this is also in the battery compartment area. So when you open the lid to get the card the batteries pop out too, so even if the batteries don't need to be changed when you put the card back in and close it, when you turn the camera on again you have to reset all the settings as well. Although this camera uses USB 1.0 and is a little slow for transferring the photos to your computer, it will probably be better this way (if your batteries can stand it) than dealing with resetting all the options to take the card out of the camera and grab them to your computer with a card reader.

Overall I found this camera takes good photos if there is enough light. It is very basic, and basically a good point and shoot camera. It autofocuses well and has a fairly decent pixelage. But it goes through batteries like crazy and doesn't do well in poor lighting.