There have been a lot of disposable cameras sold in the last 30 years, but the majority have been conventional film cameras,
where you take the whole device to a developer and get back pictures that are pretty much the same as from a simple 35mm reusable camera.
With Vistaquest’s digital version, the VQ124, things are both rather different and strangely similar.
The camera has two buttons: one on the front turns it on and, with a second press, charges the on-board flash, while a second is the shutter release, which has a nicely physical click to it and increments a tiny counter.
We found you need to be careful to press the button fully down or the count increases but no shot is taken.
There is a three-second wait each time you take a flash-lit image, but otherwise things are commendably simple.
What are the light indicators mean in this Camera?
A single red light shows that the camera is switched on, and it turns off automatically after two and a half minutes.
Pressing the shutter button with the camera turned off again causes the shot counter too click up without a shot being taken.
The viewfinder is a simple rectangular hole cut through the body of the camera but it was adequate for framing shots.
The camera takes pictures at a resolution of 1280×960 pixels or roughly 10 megapixels, which is OK for printing at 15x10cm but not much larger. Outdoor images looked decent and flash-lit ones were good enough for ‘I was there’-type shots.
In low light or for close-ups results were worse.
With a disposable film camera you don’t get the camera back after the photos are developed and the VQ124 works similarly – take up to 40 shots and then connect it to a computer to download the images.
At this point the camera locks up and won’t take further shots, even if you have only taken a few of the allotted 40 pictures.
This isn’t a bad camera for the price but we have come to expect more from digital cameras. Unless you really need a one-off camera for outdoor shots and will never take pictures again, a ‘proper’ digital camera (click here to read our review of one, the Nikon Coolpix S3100) will be far better value.
