Piece of junk, or astonishing bit of kit?  The Vivitar Ultra Wide and Slim.

Hunk of junk

The Vivitar Ultra Wide and Slim is a basic camera, it is true.  It is almost entirely plastic.  The lens is plastic and tiny.  It has no focus controls.  It has a fixed shutter speed of 1/125″ and a fixed aperture of f/11.  It is recommended you only use 24-exposure films as anything longer puts too much tension in the cog when winding on and it is liable to break.  There is no tripod thread.  There’s no flash, or even a flash shoe.  The back is fiddly to open and the whole thing feels utterly flimsy.

It’s Awesome

It is about as small as it’s possible to get for a 35mm film camera, so that explains the ‘slim’ in the name.  As for the ‘Ultra-wide’, well that’s completely justified too.  The lens has a focal length of a mere 22mm.  For a full-frame 35mm camera this does indeed qualify as Ultra Wide Angle – which in a camera this basic is quite remarkable.  Typically for an SLR camera you would be paying more than you did for the camera to secure yourself an ultra wide angle lens, quite a lot more…even if you paid quite a lot for the camera.  Of course you’d be getting a bit more than 5mm of plastic for your money, but the point is with the Vivitar Ultra you’re getting a feature that’s normally prohibitively expensive.

So it’s wide angle, then?

An ultra wide angle lens gives you two things you don’t normally get in a camera,  a larger field of view and more depth perspective.  That means it you can stand closer to objects and still get them in shot and pictures seem more like you would see them if you were inside the frame.  Of course a camera is like looking through a cardboard tube in comparison to the field of view of a human eye, but it isn’t possible to get very much wider angle views without introducing fish-eye distortion.

Cheap film