I think I was given this camera, but I can’t remember, it also looks like a charity shop purchase. The bag it came in doesn’t match the camera, but it does the job. Inside the bag was a manual and a warranty certificate. That makes me think it could be from a friend who looks after his stuff. The camera itself seems pretty bog-standard.

I couldn’t find anything about this camera on the net to help with this post. Even on the Vivitar wiki, this camera is not mentioned. So the only information available to me will have to come from observations and the manual.

The top of the camera has some information printed on it. Apparently, this camera is/has…

“Red-eye reduction/Focus free/Motor/DX/Auto Flash/ Switchable Panorama”

In the manual, it suggests using 100 or 400 ISO film only. Those are the only DX codes this camera will recognise. The lens is 28mm with 2 elements in 2 groups and the shutter is fixed at 1/150th. There are no details on the aperture but looking at the front while it is fire doesn’t show any movement, so that is probably fixed as well.

The flash is quite bright, I know because as I am trying to type this I see a residual rectangle in front of me. I noticed that when the flash was going to fire, a red light appeared on the front of the camera.

I have a feeling that was supposed to be the red-eye reduction feature. Checking the manual reveals I am right. The red light comes on at a half press then the flash fires once, it does not do the pre-flash burst I was expecting. What a swizz.

The camera does have a motor drive, but it does not automatically rewind. There is a switch on the bottom of the camera to activate the rewind motor. It leaves a tab of the film outside the cassette, which is handy.

So, it is not the most sophisticated of cameras. I loaded this example with Kodak Colorplus 200 and took it on holiday to Lyme Regis and to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. I have mentioned these places before in this post about an experiment and this one about a camera I also took to Lyme.

Here are some of the results.

The camera is fine, it worked. Perfect for situations where the camera might get damaged. To be honest I switched the film out before the end and loaded it into an OM10 to finish off, more about that in another post. The film is lovely though, lots of latitude and warm colours. Perfect for this camera…of course, it was a 200 ISO so I clearly didn’t read the manual first. So I think it slightly over-exposed everything, but it doesn’t seem to be a problem.

A run of the mill point and shoot, does what it says on the tin…almost.