Digital Cameras

Reviews

Not worth owning, my 7meg digital camera is 3 years old and takes better video then the vivitar 870. Don't know what genius came up with this camera but would suggest a career change. Have owned other Vivitar products in the past and they worked very well this one is a total flop, the pictures are out of focus with no way to adjust, bad resolution very pixelated, any movement of the camera even a slow pan results in very jerky and blurred pictures. was looking for an inexpensive camera to use while camping and hiking this isn't it. Thought about giving it to the Grand kids to play with but too many breakable parts.

Pros: small and easy to handle .. ("woooo", good for the kiddies to handle..) Cons: MANY ! No mic input, AAA battery size (wish it was AA for more life and easier usage for rechargeables), software was my biggest issue: Got the "Blue Screen of Death" after installing the software - totally crashed my system! If more time was spent on this camera from Vivitar, it would have been a lot better camera .. oh, the slot underneath to put the SD chip is a total joke!

Run, do not walk, AWAY from this camcorder. Cons- packaging - no where does it tell you what type of batteries, if any it needs. It does tell you that it is HD video 720, it fails to mention that it only gets this "quality" at 20 FPS. REALLY?? 20 FPS for HD?? HAHAHA, you are joking right? Nope, unfortunately I am not. Battery cover - Cannot be removed while this was attached to my tripod. Fortunately I figured this out before I needed the information, I had to take the cover off completely before securing it to my tripod mount in case I needed to change the batteries. Power - does not have a port for an external power source. Zoom - Why do manufacturers even put digital zoom on any cameras? Worthless. Also, my zoom button will zoom in, but not back out. Likely a defect and not representitave of this product. The only way I was able to get the zoom back out to fully wide, was to turn the power off then back on. (I am sooo glad that I monkey around with things before I actually need them)... Focus - it is fixed and it is off with no way to resolve it. Build - No bones about it - it is flimsy! And the flip out screen only flips out, does not swivel. For $100 I guess that is what I should expect though. Pros - um....can use AAA batteries and not a propriatary battery. Has a slot for a SD card - only up to 8GB... Overall I am extreemely dissappointed with this camera. I went to the store for a Kodak Zi6, and if they were not out of them *and* if i didn't need to capture my childrens play today, I would not be writing this review. I will be returning this camera and looking for the Kodak.

Pros: Uses 4 AAA penlight batteries. Uses an 8 GB HDSD card. Cons: Many - See text. I bought this camera because past Vivitar 35mm film cameras I have owned have been very good. I wanted a small light weight rugged video camera to keep on my motorcycle to video weekend excursions in the mountains. This camcorder seemed ideal until I got it home and started working with it. This camera is supposed to have 720P HD quality. It does not. It does have the correct picture size but the picture quality is very poor and when panning it is jerky. The lens is fixed focus and the image on this camera is always slightly out of focus both in video and picture mode. The camera will adjust to light variations but the adjustments are very jerky and pronounced. The color is washed out. The video is pixilated on a computer monitor screen even in the highest resolution settings when viewing the movies at full screen. The file format is AVI which is not the best in the world. The camera will record about 1.5 hours on an 8 GB HDSD card in the "720P" mode and a little over 2 hours in the 640X480 mode. There is a joy stick sticking out of the back of the camera that is used to change various settings and features. This Joy stick is very flimsy and will probably break fairly soon. There is no built in protection (guards) to keep from hitting it against anything. The record button is beside it and it creates a very loud CLICK on the movie when you hit STOP. The Zoom feature is also a very flimsy control on top of the camera. The Zoom feature is a digital CROP only and at 25% zoom the image is very out of focus. Much above 25% and the image is so pixilated that it is barely recognizable. There is a low light setting but most of the indoor video I shot in normal room light was fairly poor. This camera has unacceptable low light capability. The viewing screen will only move horizontally. You can not pivot the screen up or down. I found that to be annoying. Also, the speaker is inside the camera covered by the viewing screen when the screen is folded against the camera. I was not able to find a volume control. My suggestion is to consider buying a little more expensive camera. The reason you are buying a camcorder is to save memories. Keep your memories with the best quality you can afford. Please note, this review is only based on this one camera. I was not able to find any reviews on this model before I bought it. I wish I could have. I am going to return this one with no intentions of swapping for another one like it. Good Luck. I hope this helps you on your quest.

Reviews

This is a nice product for the money. You really get a lot in this package.

It came on time as promised and exactly how it was decribed this is a great accessories pack.

LOVE THE BAG, THE TRI-POD AND EVERYTHING ELSE THAT IS INCLUDED IN THIS KIT. THANKS FOR A GREAT BUY!

Decent value. Large tripod quite flimsy. Charger has no auto off feature. If you forget and charge > 24 hours you can fry your batteries

I ordered the accessory kit for my kid who is becoming the camera buff. She is only 14, but can take really nice photos. She is still learning her way around, but is having a blast experimenting. The kit arrived before expected (thank you) and everything works as expected. Thanks!

Reviews

There was no hesitation in my mind when I bought this printer since I already own quite a few Canon products. As expected, it is fantastic. The setup is really easy and less time consuming. Even a non tech savvy guy can set it up along with wireless etc. I kind of like the functionality they have put into the small LCD screen on the printer. Quick and easy selections, and equally quick and good quality printouts/copies. Pretty good value for money. Just love the photographs it prints on photo-paper! Superb image processing techniques for getting the best out of your picture. And all this for a really cheap price. I would surely recommend this product to anyone who cares for the quality of prints and wants a wire free environment. Good going Canon.

Easy to set up and use. Print quality is really good. Wireless set up is a breeze.

I have been using this printer for a month and it performs beautifully! Great value for the price. The wireless printing is flawless. The printing software package is very useful for setting up the photo printing. My one regret is that you can't customize the layouts beyond the templates, and you are limited on your selection of paper types when you want to print. IF you want to print photos, for example, your only choices are types of photo paper, which feed from the back of the printer. IF you want to print photos on card stock, you can't use the layout feature unless you let it think you are printing on photo paper. This is a minor inconvenience for the great quality prints this printer produces. The colors are vivid and the auto-correct feature works wonders with photos I printed. No "bad" prints. I haven't used the card reader yet, so I can't comment on that. But for basic wireless photo printing, I haven't found better. The scanner/copier works great. Scans quickly and produces good quality copies with very little deterioration.

I have been using the Canon PIXMA MP560 for over a month now. Setup was probably a lot more easier if I used the installation CD because it would install all of the required components to make my printer ready. I didn't use the installation CD that was shipped with the printer. Instead, I downloaded the setup software for the printer from Canon site. I first downloaded and installed the latest printer driver. When I tried to test the printer by sending it a Word document to print, the printer manager appeared to time out and print job eventually failed. I then called Canon technical support. The tech support person was very helpful. He guided me through each of the installation steps since I didn't use the setup CD. It turned out that I had to download and install all component software such as the MP Navigator, Easy Photo, and the Network Tool. Once the setup was complete, I had to setup the printer to use Wireless connection because I have three PCs connecting to the router on the LAN. If you want to use direct connection to the printer, you would need to purchase a special USB cable with a special head that is connecting to the printer. I have an old USB cable left over from my previous HP inkjet printer. But using a direct connection via the USB cable is inconvenient because the PC that is connected to the printer must be on before you could print anything. So, using wireless connection is much more preferable. I have no problem printing from any of my three PCs. To use the wireless connection, I needed to use WPA2 option for wireless authentication protocol. That means, I had to set up a long pass phrase through the LCD control panel so that the printer can sign on to the wireless network automatically whenever it is powered up. Whether to use WPA2 is dependent on whether you desire to have a secure wireless network. Since I had already set up my wireless router to use WPA2 protocol, I had to choose the WPA2 option when I set up my printer. I also used MAC address filtering on my wireless router and so I had to navigate through the setup menu on the LCD control panel to find the MAC address of the printer. Once the setup is complete, the printer is ready to use. By the way, you have to assign a unique name to your printer so that you can select it from a dropdown box whenever you print a document. After the setup, I tested the Easy Photo to print a color picture. It is pretty easy to use. Just start the Easy Photo on your desktop and pick a picture of your favorite to print. My test picture came out perfectly. The photo printing is pretty fast too. I haven't tried to use the memory slot on the printer to print photo directly using the control panel. But I like the Easy Photo because it makes the pictures selection so much easier. Without the MP Navigator, it was pretty clumsy trying to scan a document that had multiple pages. Originally, I used the LCD control panel to scan the document one page at a time. It worked as expected except that the next page I scanned in was stored to the same directory under the same default file name. In effect, Canon PIXMA MP560 overrides the scanned in document unless I change the default file name right after scanning to prevent the file from being overridden. The whole process was rather arduous because I had to move the flash drive back and forth between the PC and the printer in order to change the name of the scanned in document before starting the next scan. That was rather slow and tedious. I highly recommend to use the MP Navigator. Using the MP Navigator is so much easier for scanning documents. All I needed to do is to start scanning and the printer automatically saved the JPG image of the page to the selected PC. When I started the scanning on the printer, I had to choose which PC to save the image to. If I wanted to save one or more pages in a single PDF file, I could check all the related images in the sequence that I wanted my pages to appear in a PDF document. Then, I just clicked the Save All button to aggregate these selected images into a single PDF document. Without the MP Navigator, you can never collate the pages together in one document: Each page is saved as a PDF file by itself using the same default file name. That's why your file can be overridden if you forget to change the file name after the scanning if you don't install the MP Navigator on your computer. So, it is a good idea to install the MP Navigator before you do any scanning. Scanning photos works the same way as scanning documents except that you need to rename the image file names. Scanning black and white document is good. But when I tried to copy a page that had dark red color, I got a light pink color instead. The printer couldn't quite replicate the color from my original document. Copying a color document might not guarantee color fidelity in the resulting copy. Overall, the printer is pretty good to have.

I am using this printer with a Mac running OS 10.5.8 with no problems at all. It's not the quietest or the fastest printer I've ever used, but it just works. The software isn't the best printing/photo/scanning software I've ever used on the Mac, but it's functional. My only complaint: on my older Canon printers I could set it up to auto-turn on and off. The printer would automatically turn on when I sent a job to it and shut off when it was done. The Canon MP560 doesn't offer this feature, which is very disappointing...especially for a printer line that claims to be "Green." But for $98...bang for the buck is incredible for a general purpose printer.

Reviews

Cannon must make adjustments to its technonogy to insure modest cost for use of their printers. If they plan to stay in the market they will make changes soon.

I mean this post in the nicest, polite way...intended to help only...the math below (as of now) is incorrect...he took 500/$300 to get $1.67..this calculation is not set up right..also, $14*5=$70, not $75...so it would be 500/$280 in his example....which equals $1.79 a page...even though the ink is NOT this expensive (I just bought all 5 a few days ago - total was $53.48 on Amazon...free shipping too)....so even if this only does 125 pages like the guy says...the correct math would be ($53.48*4)/500 -- total expense / total pages, not the other way around...which equals about 43 cents a page for ink.....I still doubt VERY much that it is anywhere near this high....to look at this another way...$1.67*500 pages = $835! Impossible... So far everything is great with this Canon...I would definitely recommend it to someone I know. I also received this from Amazon much faster than expected..which was awesome!

Pros: Like my prior Canon AIO, this unit is feature rich. It's a great multi-purpose unit for a SOHO. And yes, as others have said, the setup can be improved but the wireless access works great. Cons: One (very big) complaint - it GUZZLES ink!! 4 sets of ink in less than 1 ream (500 pages) of paper. 90% printing is text with color, 4% mid-quality graphics and 1% photos. Tech Support says duplex uses more, but I've disabled this - see no change! Summary: Honestly, it's a wonderful printer but there's no way to justify given the ink consumption. Canon charges ~$15 per cartridge (w/S&T) x 5 colors, so a full replace set costs $75. Based on 4 sets per ream of paper, the average per page cost is a whopping $0.67! REALLY!?!?! BTW, Canon really doesn't want you to know the cost per page, as they don't provide a page counter in the printer. In short, be very leary of these $.05-.10 per page claims [...]. Your mileage will vary (significantly!). Until Canon can fix this - DON"T BUY THIS PRINTER - your wallet will be emptied. P.S. Profs to "STLtechFAN "STL" for showing me that someone does actually read these posts!!

I am very pleased with my recent purchase of the Canon MX860 printer. The printer is very quite and the print is very clear. I scanned a picture just to see how the colors were, and the colors of the picture were very bright, and looked exactly like the original. I am very pleased with the all the features on this printer. The only thing I had to do was disconnect the fax machine. With an answering machine on my phone, the answering machine comes on after 4 rings, and the fax was coming on before that when the phone would ring, so I found it easier to disconnect the fax part of the printer, and when I need it I will just connect the fax. It isn't something I would use everyday, so this was the best solution. Other then that I am very pleased with my new printer. I am also very pleased with the price, and it arrived quickly, in fact it arrived sooner then the confirmation said it would arrive. If anyone is looking for a good printer at a very good price with a lot of good features on it, the Canon MX860 is the one they should think about.

super printer. great price, photo quality. difficult to setup if you have win 7 or mac snow leopard and thus you must download the print driver from [...] and acquire the largest file there in english, as it will not tell you which one to use. phone support as usual for canon and brother is superb and will get you thru any glitches at all, or if you cannot figure the download. do not use the cdrom if you have win 7 or mac leopard. do not. get the download driver first. the print quality on canon paper is superb, it is fast. B and W is sharp too. nice to be able look at sd cards on the mini screen w/o computer too. printer is heavy and slightly bulky. cannot say about the fax component, as my experience with them and a regular undedicated phone line is a disaster. go for it, but be warned. very good MFC for the price.

Reviews

As others have noted, this printer goes through some noisy agitations before and after printing, but then does a reasonable job. However, with documents containing pictures, the pictures come out really lousy, even printing with "high" quality, unless the entire page is printed as a photo (slow and costly on ink). That means printing each page containing photos separately, a real pain. My old HP did much better. Given that most printers today produce quite sharp printouts, I would not rate this one high on print quality. Copying is easy and does quite well. Another minor irritation is the location of the cable and cord hookups. They stick out on both sides of the printer, which can be bothersome if you have it on a roll-out tray or shelf. The dimensions stated don't indicate its real size with the paper feeder open, loaded with paper, and the output tray open (about 19"W, with cords, x 11 1/2"H, with paper, x 21 1/2"D). That can be a problem with a roll-out printer shelf in a desk.

I got this printer at American TV two christmas's ago for $30! I figured at that price why not? It really is a great printer! Photo's could be sharper. Right away I printed an 8x10 of my lil guys headshot, and you could see his baby fine hair pretty crisp. Since then it seems as if it's gone downhill a little. 4x6's are great but you can tell they are 'at home' quality. I have a 8MP Canon camera. Pros -Good pictures -Scanner is easy and it will even repair older 'fuzzy' pictures. -Copier is as easy as putting it on the glass and pressing Start. - Print directly from a SD card and/or a USB flash drive also. Cons -If you misplace the drivers and 'wipe' your computer good luck getting the drivers from online for all the functions -Ink is kinda expensive $50 for the 2pak of color and black, you can get a 3 pack at Sam's club for $60 which contains the 2 of the great XL black cartridges. -It uses quite a bit of ink, black especially which suprised me. When trying to decide on this printer i found several people that had a ink error code and the whole thing would quit working. I have had this printer for a year and a half with heavy use and I have changed ink more times then I can count and it's just fine. I bought one at the same time for my brother for the $30 as well and his is working great too!

I recieved this printer from Walmart as a gift. I set it up and followed the step-by-step instructions with ease. I printed a few docments and I was satisfied. Later I left for a few hours and returned to use it for a scrap booking project. I opened the thing to see the LCD screen black and the light was flashing. I attempted to turn it on but it would not start. I unplugged it with no luck. I put it somewhere and fogot about it for a week and plugged it back in and it started with no problem. I scanned a few pictures and left the room for 10 minutes. I came back and the light was blinking again. I tried to turn it on again and it wouldn't start the same as usual. I got tired of the thing and bought a Kodak Printer which works a lot better. Overall when it did work it scanned and printed well. I had problems with getting it to turn back on and it would start to do some crazy stuff and would never turn back on. When it would work it worked good but it didn't work 90% of the time. I will never use a Canon printer again

Decent at the price for regular home-use. easy to setup and use but no wireless support

Well I'm in college and I have this printer. I wish I didn't. First of all, it takes forever to start up (I don't leave it on so I have to turn it on for every print.. I can't leave it on because theres a shortage of power slots). While its whizzing and whirring doing the startup stuff I have time to surf the web a while or maybe make a meal before class. After a few minutes it finally stops so I then click "print". A good 20-30 seconds more of click-clacking, then it starts printing at a semi-sluggish pace. After the print is done, I press the power button and it does its final act of loud, unnecessary noises before dying with a loud POP! I hate using this thing but it is faster than walking to the library and printing from there so... if I hadn't received this as a gift I would have returned it already due to the cost of ink alone. Ugh.

Reviews

Very good Camera.. Very user friendly.. But I don't like: - There is no charger. You can charge the battery using the camera. - The Camera is NTSC there is no PAL if you are planing to use it on Europe or Middle east ..

The Canon Vixia HFS10 is by far the best camcorder that I have used, but it sits unused after I ran into one essential problem. You cannot extract the videos off the camcorder with standard and professional software - such as Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 or Adobe Elements. You can try iMovie but I spent 5 hours extracting a 3 minute clip. So, once you use the internal flash memory - you're stuck. In order to record more, you must delete everything and cannot preserve anything. Is it fair to blame Canon? Yes. Or is this Adobe's problem? Yes. I blame both. I blame Canon because the software that they provide with your purchase does not extract videos (only the pictures). I blame Adobe (and others) because they are supposed to be the best. I blame both because after one year - neither has fixed the problem so don't count on quick resolutions. Every company blames the other. My point: Stay away from this Camcorder unless you are were lucky enough to do video editing with Final Cut Pro (which works). However, I find it ridiculous that I would have to spend an additional $1000 to get video off a $800 camcorder.

I bought this camera about 5 months ago because I heard the picture quality was great, which it is, but I also was intending on taking advantage of the 1/8th inch mic input in order to use a shotgun mic. Every time I use this feature an extremely loud beeping noise goes off when the access light blinks. Really really apparent and impossible to get any good audio. Other people seem to have the same problem: [...] . The audio attenuator helps a little but doesn't eliminate the problem. I called Canon and they basically said "that's how the camera is supposed to work." What?! Thanks Canon. Go with the Sony consumer HDs. I've never had any problems with them.

I use this camera to produce YouTube videos. I use them to promote books that I have written. This camera does a very good job. It allows you to attach an external mic, which is very important for the lav mic that I use. You can also buy cannon attachments that fit to the top of the camera and allow them more direct access to the camera than other third party add-ons. It is also a very advanced digital camera. I am quite happy using it in place of my digital camera when I take it outside.

When the camera's arrived I was very excited to finally get to use them. So far the picture quality is excellent and pretty consistent... Great for Gorilla style shooting and the low light is decent as well. The manual focus takes getting use to but I expected it too be worse but it's not bad...the only downside is you have to connect to a power source when putting video clips on a computer. Not really a big problem considering that I put my video clips on a beefy powermac...but I can see how it could be an issue for some people with different equipment.