Around Town With A $20 digital Camera
Summer 2010

The Camera

When I saw this camera for $19.95 at a local pharmacy my curiosity got the better of me and I had to see what sort of pictures it makes.  Made by Sakar International, Inc., this Digital Concepts Series 98379 is about 3 1/4" x 2 1/4" in size, has a resolution of 640 x 480, and enough internal memory to hold 79 pictures.  It uses 2 AAA batteries and the batteries are required to hold the pictures in memory.  Remove the batteries and the pictures are gone.  It includes a nice software package and pictures are downloaded to a PC via a USB cable.

The image quality is astoundingly poor by today's standards, yet there is something charming about the pictures.  They look like they've been Photoshopped to look like impressionistic paintings.  There are no focus or exposure controls.  The focal length seems long for a small fixed lens camera, at least 50mm equivalent.  The aperture is fixed at f/2.6 yet the depth of field zone begins around 2 ft, so the sensor must be extremely tiny.  Color fidelity is very good, and it does a good job on exposure, both indoors and out in bright sunlight, so it must have a wide range of shutter speeds.  There is no half-press trigger position to lock in exposure, so there really is no control of any sort. 

The optical viewfinder shows you more image than you get and most is cut off the bottom, so you learn to put liberal space around the subject and aim a bit low.  The playback view screen is horrible and is of little use other than seeing if you got close to what you were pointing at and deciding whether to save or delete captured images.  It's not the same proportion as the sensor so it's worse than the viewfinder for composing.  There is no chimping enjoyment with this one. 

These two photos of the camera were taken with a small Casio pocket camera.  The following 17 pictures from the Sakar are unprocessed, straight from the camera (except the first two which were changed to B&W in Photoshop). 
 

 

 

 

 

17 Pictures

I plan to add to this collection of pictures from time to time.

1
At the supermarket


2


3


4


5


6


7


8


9


10


11
Even though I moved the camera, there's something I like about this.


12
At the beach in stormy weather.


13


14


15


16


17
This morning at church.


 

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