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| 02:01 AM | ||
| Users Online Now: 1,631 (Who's On?) | Visitors Today: 178,568 | |
| Pageviews Today: 240,940 | Threads Today: 73 | Posts Today: 1,055 |
| 02:01 AM | ||
Stupid vivitar cameras and their fake optical zoom. | |
| Anonymous Coward User ID: 59573097  United States06/24/2014 12:11 AM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | Got a 14MP vivitar F529 as a gift a few weeks ago. It states that it has 5X optical zoom I am not an experienced photographer by any means but I have been using it for a bit, and started thinking … Something is not right here. I was noticing the image start looking more pixilated when still in the optical portion of the zoom range, So I started paying attention a little more. The zoom on the camera doesn’t work seamlessly from one end to the other. Then it dawned on me. It’s not a true 5x optical zoom. From what I can tell, it’s really a 2 to 3X optical zoom intertwined with digital zoom. It moves the lens some zoom steps, then throws in a digital zoom step on others. I know vivitar got hounded by camera reviews for their low end camera that had a fake 2X optical zoom. But the F529 isn’t the low end. It’s over a 100 dollar camera in some places. The fact that they would pull this type of crap on the mid level point and shoot consumer cameras just has my jaw on the floor. They are just asking for a class action lawsuit. I get what they was thinking. If they threw a little bit of digital zoom in with the optical zoom, people wouldn’t really notice the shift from one to the other, and they could put a cheaper 2X zoom lens in instead of a a more expensive 5x lens set. And then they could undercut other cameras in the market with real 5x optical zoom. The lawnmower people tried that with lawnmower engine horsepower. The 16HP lawnmowers had the same engine as the 14 HP lawnmowers. They just had a 16HP sticker on them. Thinking that the users wouldn’t notice the few HP difference while still paying out the extra money for the larger engine. They ended up getting hit with a clash action, and they lost. Vivitar is evidently wanting to replicate those results in the camera market. Don’t get me wrong, I still find the camera perfectly useable, and will continue to use it, but I just won’t use the zoom function because I know that all it will do is pixilate the image with little actual useful optical zoom. Way to go designers at vivitar. You take a relatively useable camera and F.U.B.A.R it because you wanted to cheat on the marketing game a bit. I could have lived with a mediocre 2X real optical zoom. You throwing the digital zoom into it means that you have made the zoom function basically unusable.  |
| Anonymous Coward (OP) User ID: 59573097 United States06/24/2014 02:25 AM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation |  I done a little experimenting. There is six steps in the “optical zoom” range before you get to the digital zoom portion on the indicator. It is suppose to be 5X optical zoom. I pointed it at a set of tiles and zoomed in to the limit of the “optical zoom” range, it did appear to be 5X larger. All be it a lot more pixilated. So, now to the experimenting. I turned out most of the lights in the living room where I could see the hot pixels on the CCD. And mounted it on a tripod. Pointed it to a piece of electronic equipment at the other end that had a fait red status light that I could compare in relation to the location of the hot pixels I could see. From what I could tell first step is pure optical zoom. Second step is optical and digital zoom. Third step is pure optical zoom. Steps four, five, and six are a mix of optical and digital zoom. At step seven you enter the pure digital zoom range. On steps two, four, five, and six, you could see the hot CCD pixels move across the display screen and get larger. The hot pixels moved in relation to the stationary light in the view of the camera on all zoom steps. So there is real optical zoom there, but from what I can tell, it’s probably around an actual 2X real optical zoom. They get the other 3X by digital zooming while still in the optical zoom range. What gets me is how much thought, work, and design they put into such an idiotic idea. The designers at vivitar are awfully industrious idiots.  |
| Anonymous Coward User ID: 59589542 United States06/24/2014 02:49 AM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | |
| Anonymous Coward User ID: 15570612 United States06/24/2014 02:51 AM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | |
| Anonymous Coward (OP) User ID: 59573097 United States06/24/2014 03:11 AM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | $100 is super cheap for a camera. Quoting: Anonymous Coward 15570612 You should not really expect an awesome, high-quality camera for $100. I don’t expect an awesome high quality camera, but I also don’t expect the manufacturer to blatantly lie either. Just because it isn’t a 2000 dollar camera, doesn’t give them a pass at lying about a basic physical operating characteristic of that camera. Now if it was a 10 dollar camera at some street market that was made by a sweet shop in china and illegally smuggled into the US, then I should expect them to be lying about it’s capabilities. But for a camera made by a major manufacturer sold by almost every major retailer in the US to be intentionally fraudulently marketed, then NO I don’t expect that, even from a $20 camera. The industry standards for definitions of functionality in camera equipment is well established, so no manufacture, no mater how cheap the camera, gets a pass. If you applied that logic of yours to the lawn mower market, then the purchasers of the $1200 dollar riding mower should have expected to be lied too, because if he wanted good quality, he would have gotten a $5000 Dixie chopper. Monetary value of the product is no factor in the question of fraudulent advertising. It either is, or is not what the product is advertised as. |
| Anonymous Coward User ID: 79909856  Sweden06/10/2021 09:07 PM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | |
| Anonymous Coward User ID: 71088931 United States01/08/2023 02:47 PM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | You know the truth about your camera, you might be the only one. They will keep selling them and fooling people. They don’t care, because they don’t have to care. |
| Anonymous Coward User ID: 79673900  Switzerland01/08/2023 02:58 PM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | |
