olanin_justin's Full Review: Aiptek PenCam VR Digital Camera
I needed a second digital camera to keep in my car for emergencies. I found this camera at Wal Mart for $49.99. I have a lot of experience with digital cameras and right of the back knew it wasn’t going to be too good of a camera, but with the added voice and video function, decided to get it.
Some of the good points (and there aren’t many) are; its small and can fit in most spaces, a 640x480 image sensor with is good for the price at this time, can select a high quality and low quality, usb connection (with all cameras are these days).
There are a lot of bad aspects to the camera that pretty much make it worthless. Lets start with the audio function. It boasts 13 minute record time, but to record you have to hold in the button tightly or it stops. Plus the quality is sampled at 10KHz which makes it useless because its very grainy and has a lot of static. It also boasts a video recording feature, with is worthless. Basically it just takes a few pictures per second and you have to join them with there software. The software they give you is very poor and hard to use. It installs about 150mb of data just for a interface to the camera. Its hard to figure out how to download them and nothing is labeled. The memory is volatile, meaning if power is lost even briefly, everything is lost. The battery life is very poor. I left it in my car a week (with the camera off) but after a week when I had to use it, they were dead. I found out the hard way that even if the camera is off, it still requires power. I have to keep the batteries and camera separate till I have to use them. The image sensor is a CMOS sensor, which isn’t good, but is inexpensive to manufacture. You cant take pictures in anything but broad daylight. There is no zoom. The picture quality is overall not good.
I will continue to keep this in my car just in case I need it, but hopfully I wont.
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