
I've had the The Sipix Style Cam Blink II for a number of years. It is really tiny, just a bit more than 2 inches on each side. At the time that I bought it, most of the other cameras near to this size only offered QVGA resolution (320x240). This camera offered a whopping full VGA resolution (640x480) which is good for web pages.
It has an optical viewfinder but no flash. It has a little LCD for picture count and mode selection. It will take short "video" clips but they are actually just a series of quick photos that need to be combined on the PC into an AVI. There is a USB 1.1 interface and it takes a single AAA battery.
The memory is only 8 Meg but that can hold about 30 "high" resolution photos. Unfortunately, like most ultra low end cameras it is not flash RAM and once the battery dies you lose all your photos. With only a single AAA you can image that the battery life is not all that long. To keep the memory live it has to power it constantly so the battery will continue to drain even when you're not using the camera. Eventually, I put a plastic pull tab between the battery and the contact so that the battery would stay fresh when there where no photos saved.
It is a very poor performer in low light but actually not too bad outside in bright light (remember this is a toy camera so "not too bad" is just slightly above "crapy"). The one thing that attracted be to this camera was its ultra small size. It was easy to keep in my pocket or snapped on to my badge lanyard at conferences. I took some photos with this camera at DefCon 11. I wouldn't recommend this camera to kids, at least not now, because it doesn't have flash RAM. I may try to attach this to one of my small helicopters and see how that works.
posted at: 22:30 | path: /Toys/Cameras | permanent link to this entry