{"id":97127,"date":"2025-01-28T14:31:14","date_gmt":"2025-01-28T19:31:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.b-vong.com\/journal\/?p=97127"},"modified":"2026-01-16T13:47:07","modified_gmt":"2026-01-16T18:47:07","slug":"vivitar-retro-keychain-camera-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.b-vong.com\/journal\/vivitar-retro-keychain-camera-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Vivitar Retro Keychain Camera Review!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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Vivitar “Vintage” Keychain Camera Review<\/h2>\n

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5. Five. Cinco. Ha.<\/h1>\n

$5<\/strong> was what this camera cost. (Thanks Jonathan) 5 bucks will barely get you a Wendy’s meal, but it might not even get you one banh mi in Atlanta these days.  For a brief time last week, this camera was on sale for $5 on Wal-Mart. How bad could it be?<\/p>\n

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What is this camera?<\/h2>\n

This is a teeny tiny toy camera styled to look like a vintage camera or a camera emoji. It has built in memory, 6MB enough for 100 pictures, shoots video and has a color LCD screen! I thought it was just for show! It charges via USB-C with the included cable and supports microSD cards.<\/p>\n

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How is the image quality?<\/h2>\n

The images are really bad. Not bad in a good way. Not bad in a great Digital Harinezumi<\/a> way. Nope, I would say this is probably like a 320 x 240 pixel flip phone cam from back in the day, but with insane up rez interpolation that really makes for a blurry mess.<\/p>\n

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Taking a picture of my computer screen<\/p><\/div>\n

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The lowest “1MP” setting is 1280×720 but by looking at the jaggies in the aliasing on straight diagonal lines the real resolution looks like 320 x 180 to me. According to exiftool the sub sampling is 4:2:0 too. (photography speak for hardly any color data)<\/p>\n

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The instruction manual says it only supports 32GB cards but the 128GB (and 256GB!) that I inserted does work.<\/p>\n

256GB card at 1MP, an average of 150KB each picture would give you an astounding 1,700,000ish Photos by my math.<\/p>\n

At 14MP, an average of 800KB each picture would give you 320,000ish photos.<\/p>\n

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Me personally I would load up a cheap MicroSD card from Micro Center for like $6 and shoot without a care at 14MP. Not because it’s better quality (it’s not), if only because it gives the timecode\/date stamp more resolution in the bottom corner. It’s a bit too large on the lower settings.<\/p>\n

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The file system is IMG00000.jpg so it should support an astonishing IMG99999.jpg before rolling over. And I definitely don’t have the patience to be clicking that long to see if it does.  If you want to download the photos off the camera, you can use the included cable to connect to a computer\/laptop\/usb dongle.  It will give you options to enable USB mode (highlighted in orange) and clicking the power button lets the computer recognize it.  If you have a micro SD card in it, it will show up as two drives on the Mac OS desktop for example.<\/p>\n

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Why would I want one?<\/h2>\n

I think this camera shines as a vintage digital video camera though. Its really low fi aesthetic might work for some projects, and who knows, might even be a decent knockoff of the legendary Digital Harinezumi<\/a>. Music videos have been shot with a Nintendo 3DS, so why not this one too. From my testing it looks like very compressed miniDV from about 20+ years ago.<\/p>\n

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When it comes to video though, if we had this in 2000 (with today’s dirt cheap memory prices) it would have been amazing simply for the fact we were still fighting with tape based DV cameras that always locked up or ate them. The two mini DVD-R Handycams I have here don’t even work at all so that didn’t solve anything either. A solid state camera was only a dream in 2000.<\/p>\n

128GB at HD says 18hrs:50min:26secs, 14:07:50 at FHD and 28:15:44 FHD on a 256GB card.<\/p>\n

I noticed video files are limited to 3:00 minutes max for each file and it will split them. Sizes range with the complexity of the image but the ones I shot were about 180-240MB for each .AVI long clip. The aspect ratio is 4:3!<\/p>\n

This camera does remind me of all the junk “vlogging” stuff I shot back in the day.  In fact, here’s a recap of a fun day driving around and looking for comic books and vintage gear!<\/p>\n

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There’s a pretty neat comic book store in old downtown Commerce. I am rebuying all of my old comics that I donated ages ago.<\/p><\/div>\n

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All this food for $14 I think? Shout outs to the hard working small town fast food folk. It’s not lost on me the privilege in being able to drive around and browse for essentially old toys and take pictures.<\/p><\/div>\n

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I hadn’t been to the J&J Flea Market in probably over 20 years. They actually have some comic and VG vendors inside. It’s a legit Flea Market like back in the day so you really have to enjoy rummaging and digging. I ended up with some stickers and old classic movies on VHS.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Bizarro Wuxtry in downtown Athens was definitely a frequent haunt for us back in the HS and UGA days. Crazy how the vibe is still the same after all these years. And yes that MJ poster is still there in the back.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Taking pix in my vintage tech room with this crazy low res camera<\/p><\/div>\n

So in summary, this little toy of a camera looks pretty neat, is an interesting conversation piece that actually takes photos\/videos, and good as a truly lo fi digital diary type of always with you cam. If you really don’t care about image quality, one could load up this camera and photograph every day, all the way from freshman to graduation–on the SAME microSD card. That would be a heck of a project, but to be honest, please go get and use a better camera. Like any DSLR. Or even 2000’s era digicams. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

BUT AGAIN THIS CAMERA WAS $5!!!!!!!!!!! \ud83d\ude00<\/h3>\n

If I was in an indie lo fi band like my new favorites Castlebeat and copperplate <–AI but it sounds sooo good!<\/em>), I would use something like this to shoot the videos.<\/p>\n

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Vivitar “Vintage” Digicam with the OG X100 that it is trying to shamelessly mimic!<\/p><\/div>\n

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