Home > Consumer Reviews > Vivitar Vivicam 3625 2.1MP Digital Camera

I bought this camera 2 weeks ago for a trip to Europe. It takes great pictures. And the price is good too. Although the camera body is quite small, it limits it battery capacity to only 2AA batteries. This camera really needs to have 4AA batteries. After only a few indoor shots, with brand new out of the box brand name batteries, the battery indicator had dropped to less than half. And then the flash would take up to a minute to charge. This was without using the LCD. With the LCD on it must be worse.
But I must say the picture quality is very, very good. And as with all digital cameras, the digital zoom feature is completely without value. If you want the ability to zoom in, you really need to have an optical zoom. Anything else and you're hurting the quality of your photos.
The camera also has a movie mode, good for it, but no sound! Who wants to take movies without sound? Most digital cameras with movie modes have sound. The camera also lacks a web cam mode, something that even sub $100 cameras normaly have.
I guess I will fork out the money for the Fujifilm FinePix 2800. I've since returned the Vivitar, but for [the money,] it's a good deal.

OK, this is my first digital camera so maybe I don't know everything about how they work. But I've had it for only a couple of hours and it's already running out of (battery) juice, after I've gotten a total of ONE photo out of it. (I took three more but the focus was off and I deleted them, or tried to ... read further for that problem.) The photo quality of that one photo I DID get IS very good, AND the set-up in Windows was extremely easy (as soon as I connected the camera with the included USB connector, my PC recognized it and I had no problem downloading the one photo), but those pluses don't make up for the poor quality of the camera and the fact that it eats batteries even more than most digital cameras do.

Another problem with the camera is that the back controls are extremely difficult to use. For example, to delete an image, you press the button for the trash, then it asks you if it's OK to delete. You make the choice go to "yes" and press OK ... and press OK, and press OK, and press OK, all the while waiting for something to happen. (I WAS able to delete one image so I know I was doing it correctly ... but then the camera basically just stopped working.) A design issue: the button where the "OK" command is flexes all over the place but doesn't register to the camera that you're pressing the "OK" button. Very frustrating.

OK, I just turned the camera on again (wishful thinking) and pressed the "self-timer" button. No response. Tried it again. Still no response. Battery power indicator says battery power is half gone.

Overall, this camera was a waste of money. I'll be returning it tonight and buying another one -- NOT a Vivitar.

I am going to rebuff one reviewer by the name of Kyle.

" But unfortunatrely it does this glitchy thing while taking a picture and sometimes in order to take a see your pictures you have to take a picture first."

This is not true. I take plenty of pictures with no hassles.

"The camera freezes a lot meaning you have to shut it down manually which is bad for the camera."

This is not true. My camera has yet to freeze on me after a year of usage.

"I don't recommend this camera unless you have a rechargeable pack of PATIENCE! "

This is also not true. My camera works great. Every problem I've had with it has been an end-user problem. Once I got really pissed becuse it would not power on with the SD card in, but would with it not in. The problem was that I had weak batteries, and SD cards require more energy to power on than Internal RAM. This principle is also true with PDA's. Always expect more power usage when using a memory card over internal RAM.

Also for best results dont use rechargeables, but use Lihtium batteries.

This is an excellent end user camera. For effecient use, its recomended that the operator know what he or she is doing. If you are digital camera illiterate please do not blame it on the camera!

I don't have any need to lie about this camera. I don't work for Amazon or Vivitar or do I care much about their sales. This camera takes pictures bigger than your screen. It's amazing and it has a lot of flash power. The batteries drain somewhat fast, so get some rechargeables. It's amazing, try it out. I got one and I'm so glad to toss the old "Web"cam.

Update: Batteries draining so fast is gettting very annoying! There needs to be a A/C adaptor.

I BOUGHT THIS CAMERA 2 YRS AGO AND IT IS GREAT THE ONLY PROBLEM I HAVE IS I DONT HAVE THE DISK TO INSTALL IT ON MY NEW COMPUTER.I LOVE IT THE PICTURES ARE GREAT. I TAKE THEM AND PRINT THEM OUT...