Vivitar Ultra Wide & Slim Review
Just over a year ago, I started reading about the whole lomo photography fad. Being the trend-whore that I am, of course I wanted to try it out, but I wasn't about to pay $250 for a hyped up LC-A. Browsing more and more for a cheaper solution, I stumbled upon some websites and Flickr groups for what has been called the "poor man's lomo"-- the Vivitar Ultra Wide & Slim.
In nutshell, it's a disposable camera that can be reloaded with film. With an all-plastic body and lens, it's incredibly cheap, but differentiates itself by having an ultra-wide lens at 22mm (hence the name). A wide-angle lens was something I also wanted to play around with, so I picked mine up on eBay for $2, plus a few dollars shipping. A lens for my SLR that wide would cost hundreds of dollars. I figured it would be a cheap way to try out both lomo and a wide-angle lens.
Aside from the wide field of view, the tech specs aren't anything special (Aperture f/11 and Shutter Speed 1/125th sec), but it's known for an extreme vignette effect/defect.
Using it is a snap, just:
- Look through the viewfinder. (optional)
- Click the button.
- Remember to wind the film.
That's it. No focusing, no fiddling with aperture, shutter speed, white balance, metering. Just a single button.
I say the viewfinder step is optional since the lens is so wide that anything in the general direction it's pointed is probably going to be in frame, plus it's not that accurate anyway. It's common to have fingers in the shots that I let other people take from when they hold the camera since the angle is so wide and the viewfinder doesn't even cover all of it. I'd say it's not showing at least 5-10%.
In the past year, I've probably put fewer than 10 rolls of film through it. While going through them to pick out a few for this post, I realized that most of the pictures are actually pretty crappy, and that some entire rolls of shots would be unusable, but I had loads of fun taking them. I think it's because I realized that with the wide-angle lens forces me to get in people's faces to get a better shot. It's definitely a different shooting experience compared to using a huge zoom on an SLR.
Pros:
- Incredibly cheap $2 (but you have to pay for film and processing)
- Fun
- Lightweight and pocketable - I don't like to carry stuff in my pockets while snowboarding, but the camera and some film made it up on a few trips the last two seasons.
- Random effects from the cheap lens and construction - lens flares, vignetting, soft focus, light leaks
- "Film look-and-feel" - some people like film grain
- Wide-angle lens - gives the photos a different perspective from the usual snapshot.
Cons: (of course these are all considered 'pros' if you write them off as lomo experience "features")
- No control - just one button, no way to control the exposure on the camera.
- Unpredictable results - what you see might not be what you get
- Only works in sunny conditions - since there's no way to adjust the exposure, you're limited to trying to adjust the light in the environment. which can be hard.
- Film experience and look-and-feel - you have to lug around film, pay and wait for it to be processed, and get parts of pictures chopped off it it was at the end of the roll.
Conclusion:
If you're at all curious about it, I'd say get one and try it out! Even including film and processing costs, it's probably the cheapest camera you can try. It would take 10-20 rolls of processed film before it approached the same cost of a Canon Digital Point & Shoot or the Lomo LC-A body alone. And if you've already shot 10-20 rolls of film, you must be having fun. If not, hype it up, and sell it to some hipster for $200. The cheaper it looks, and the more expensive it is, the hotter the trend.
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PS. I've tried posting this four or fives times, and I just can't figure out how Posterous decides which photos to group together in an album, and which to separate. I tried from both mail.app and gmail's web interface, both using HTML formatting. I've given up and hope that they're all at least in an album, with the ubercliche shots at the end. Check out what it did here. It's supposed to be 12 photos, alternating 1 photo, 1 caption. It split out three photos, and then split the rest in to two albums.
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