Vivitar goes retro with new ViviCam 8027
By Donald Melanson 
posted March 13th 2009 1:53PM
posted March 13th 2009 1:53PM
Vivitar is hardly the only camera manufacturer to go back to its roots with some of its digital offerings, but that's hardly a trend we're going to complain about, especially when the cameras in question are such a marked improved over the company's standard fare. Of course, there's a decidedly less substantial difference once you move beyond the appearance, with this new ViviCam 8027 packing the same 8 megapixels, 3x optical zoom, and 2.4-inch LCD as its blander 8025 counterpart, plus the usual anti-shake measures, a basic movie mode, red eye reduction, and a rechargable lithium ion battery. No word on a price just yet, but it looks like you'll be able to snag this one in your choice of black or yellow in addition to the red.
[Via Chip Chick]
[Via Chip Chick]
Am I the only one who prefer the modern camera look?
I only care about the sensor, lens and ergonomics
Then for god's sake don't whatever you do buy this. It will ruin your life.
I like the retro-style cameras, mostly because I learned photography on a 30 year old pentax slr.
But the build quality of this looks like a fisher price toy.
I never had problems with older Vivitar film based cameras, but after my last Vivitar I'll never buy one again. It was actually my first digital camera, your right about the build quality, complete garbage. When I first got it I thought I got scammed and got some chinese bootleg camera or something. It was just terrible in every aspect, If you moved AT ALL it would smear the entire picture to a ridiculous degree, it looked like you where running when you took the pic. I had to get into the habit of taking every picture 3 times and even then they would all be blurred sometimes, The digital camera I have now has no anti-shake at all and this never happens. It took FOREVER to focus, would almost always focus incorrectly, would randomly screw up images by putting these weird white lines all over it and pumping up the contrast (eventually it started doing this on every single picture), oh and the battery life was about 15 minutes, no joke. You couldn't use rechargeables at all either because the camera would just assume they where dead and shut off (I know the voltage is lower but I tried my friends expensive ones that have the higher voltage and it still did it which leads me to believe it had some kind of voltage checking mechanism that obviously doesn't work very well because it would die so fast on regular batteries that would still work in other devices) it took forever to save pictures, the video files it shot used some weird proprietary audio codec that nothing could play and Vivitar offered nothing for, The digital zoom was useless because it would make everything so pixelated in the pictures, the screen had terrible lag and blurring, The TV-Out was also of terrible quality, even when viewing pictures, the problems never stopped. They really went downhill or something because my dads Vintage Vivitar SLR is fantastic and it still works (its probably like 20 or 30+ years old)
Anyone else think the camera in the image looks like an awful plastic toy?
Yup.
That's because it is.
I am wanting me to get one of those there digicams.
It's just a shame they're still as bad now as they were back then.
This looks like a camera my father would have owned. I kind of like it. It looks like some kind of vinyl coating on the front. My guess is that would add some more gripiness to the camera, and less fingerprintaliciousness. Both are positives in my book. Now I'm going to go make up some more words...
I liked the look of this camera very much. It looks like older Leica.
Besides that, I just checked the specs on their page: http://vivitar.com/products/16/VC8027%20Spec%20Sheet.jpeg
Let's see:
- Resolution: nothing special
- Video resolution: nothing special
- Lens (36-108mm, 1:2.8~4.8) - nothing special, not wide, not tele, not very fast
- Zoom (3x): such a zoom looks good only on wide angle lens, here it is useless
- ISO: nothing special, no 80 ISO, no ISO over 400 (though I wouldn't worry of ISO over 400)
- Manual exposure and white balance: No (manual EV doesn't count)
- Everything else: nothing special
So I think the only good feature of this camera is a look. Everything else is rather low. Maybe the processor is good, but I idn't see it in the specs.
I would say, $150 MSRP for such a camera + $50 for a look = $200 maximum. Street price = $100-$150
And one should check the quality of images before recommending it.
What do you mean nothing special. They state it has 36-108mm lens, and they don't even say 35mm equivalent. Which means a hella incredible telephoto, or a full size sensor. What it also means: complete lack of detail, flotation bathroom toy quality, which all equal to COMPLETE GARBAGE AT ANY PRICE.
@Pretol
Well, when I said "nothing special" I tried to avoid words "utter crap". You are right, of course.
At first, I was really impressed with the looks of the camera, and then I checked the specs... and was disappointed.
What appears to be the build quality shames the old beastly Vivitar lenses, which were big enough and heavy enough that if a Puma were coming at you, you could kill it!
I saw the black one of these cameras. Its such a cheap piece of crap. its light as hell, feels like cheap plastic. it has a bunch of dial and buttons that dont do anything. when u see this in real life it looks like someone found this at the bottom ofa cereal box.
Boooo!
This camera looks like it's made of Nerf material. And the fake viewfinder? Ugh. I'm not surprised at Mikey's comments--it LOOKS cheaply made.
IS THAT A VIEWFINDER!!?? Quick, some with a thermometer run down to hell and report back immediately.
An optical VF on a modern digital P&S isn't completely unheard of. The real issue is finding one that's any good. All the ones I've seen are these diminutive "tunnels" that show at most about two thirds of the frame and don't even possess corrective markings.
Awesome, Vivitar just ripped off my FED 2.
Although, my FED 2''s vulcanite is a dark green, but I'm still liking the looks of this camera.
FED 2... is it a copy of Leica II ? ;)) Anyway, no pun intended, if this VIVITAR 8027 copied FED 2, then VIVITAR 8027 would be an awesome camera.
That's not a toy?
Excuse me while I go hurl in the corner.
Somebody should make a digital sensor plus storage plus battery that would fit where 35mm film goes in actual retro cameras.
"recharhable". Right.
Vivitar is just a licensed name. It was purchased by Sakar a while back. Sakar is famous for 29.99 1.3MP digital cameras at Wally Mart, so I'm sure this camera is a POS with a new name.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10024590-92.html
It's ugly.
if anyone actually wants this thing, dont get your hopes up. I just got the run around from their "headquarters", aka the most inept staff I have ever had to deal with. I asked them about this camera and they acted like I was asking them to explain thermodynamics to me. They have NO CLUE whats going on over there. god forbid one should ever have a real technical problem with on of their products. I will never be buying from vivitar.