Customer Reviews

Argus Sprout Yellow Digital Camera Li-on Battery

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I was out buying a digital camera (got a real nice one too!) and as I was checking out this little sucker caught my eye. $10 at best buy. AND it's water resistant! So yeah, I figured I was already spending a couple hundred, what's 10 more? And for such a cheap digi, it actually exceeded my expectations!

I figured it would be black and white gigi-pet looking pictures. More like the original camera phones. So yes, it's a little blurry and kinda grainy. But you can toss it across rooms (it's been caught everytime), water resistant (so playing in the rain when it's bright out), and if it breaks or I lose it I'm not really concerned.

The software it comes with is like a glorified PAINT program. Yes, that's the paint that comes with every windows program ever and hasn't changed since windows 3.1. But you can smear, put borders, put your face on Abe Lincoln's body, fun little chitzy stuff. You can also take pictures while it's hooked up to the computer (in the little PHOTO IMPRESSION 4 that it uses) and see yourself on the screen. Reminiscent of the original web cams, minus the recording aspect. It's easy enough to save pictures to the comp, open it with another program, and save it in a different format.

*EDIT- you save it as whatever file it tells you to and THEN resave it as whatever format you want. I actually had saved it, closed the program by accident, reopened it with PHOTO IMPRESSION again and saved it as jpg and it was fine) -END EDIT*

So for the money I paid, not bad. It's not great, but what do you expect?

So officially:

Pros:
-ease of use
-easy setup
-goofy college kid resistant (didn't say PROOF)
-works
-holds 26 pics
-can see yourself on the computer for photos
-glorified paint program (nowhere near as good as photoshop, but better than paint!)
-generally (3 out of 5) identifiable pictures
-rubber grip/water resistant
-EXTREMELY CHEAP!

Cons:
-blurry
-grainy
-small
-no flash
-itty bitty
-needs VERY steady hand
-EXTREMELY CHEAP!

It gets a 4 star for what it is, not what it isn't. It's not fuji, nikon, canon, etc and doesn't pretend to be.

$20? Don't fall for it, Amazon shoppers. This is available for $10 at your local corporate drug store, and isn't even worth that.

Two years ago I bought one for the youngsters, so they'd have a camera of their own on outings. I knew from the specs and price that the photo quality would be bad, but kids don't care about megapixels. Unfortunately, I forgot that kids DO care about preview screens and buttons and knobs. The simple streamlined sprout did not capture their attention at all, and I was unimpressed with both the picture quality and the terrible software required to use the camera. It stopped taking photos entirely during my tests, and I didn't care enough at the time to figure out if it was the battery or product failure.

I stumbled across it again recently when cleaning out a desk and tried installing the software on my new-ish computer to make sure there were no photos left on the camera before chucking it in the toy box. The drivers won't install properly, so the computer can't read the camera at all; a quick search revealed that this is a very common problem. More common? That the camera frequently is DOA or stops working after a few uses. (Oh hey! That's familiar!)

On the upside, it will no doubt get much more use as a fake spy camera in the toy box than it ever did as a real camera.

I had bought 5 of these on a whim, different colors, none worked. Their 'support' wanted more money than I had paid for return shipment.

I bought this for my granddaughter and within two days it quit working. A total rip-off!

I bought this camera for my son for christmas. While I expected low picture quality, this camera is still a disappointment. Pictures are worse than the freebie camera phones I've had.

Linux support is totally not available. According to comments in gphoto source code it probably never will be supported due to its proprietary compression technique. This means my son cannot use his new camera on his computer, nor can I use it on mine. We have to fire up the old XP machine to retrieve the photos.

The software used to get the photos off is cheap and shoddy. The window opens right in the center of the screen, renders on top of all other running programs, and is not movable. Pictures are saved in .png format (good for graphics, not good for photos).

Flush your [...] bucks down the toilet instead of buying this camera.