I had been after a cheap and simple camera for quiet sometime, something that could just put me on until I had the money for something a little more expensive and fancy. After much research and debating I finally decided on the Vivitar 508 HD camcorder. I purchased it from Amazon costing me £25.00 with free super saver delivery. It took only a few days to arrive, but of course I could have paid extra for the camera to be delivered quicker.

There are a variety of different colours to choose from including black and red. I went for the girlie pink version.

On opening up the packaging I was immediately struck by how cheap it looked, but for the price I had paid for it I wasn't too surprised by this. I spent around half and hour playing around with it and figured out how it all worked relatively easily. (I rarely read the instructions straight off for products like this, rather refer to them later if I need too) So it is fair to say that this is extremely easy to set up and use.

The camera is small and fits in the palm of the hand easily and comfortably. There is a adjustable hand strap on the back to keep the camera firmly in place. The LCD screen flips out from the side, and measures 1.8", again on the small side.

In total there are five modes, video, photo, audio, playback and set-up. All of which are easy to navigate. I was especially impressed by the fact that sound was avaliable during playback as there is a built in microphone and speaker. Althought this is ment to be a HD camera, i found the quality rather poor. There is a light which can be switched on whilst using in dark places, but I found this to be fairly useless. As with many digital camcorders there is some built in memory, in this case 8mb. However, it takes SD cards so plenty of memory can be added if needed. Picture files are in jpg, whilst video is avi and audio wav. A USB cable is included along with a image managing software c.d, so files can easily be downloaded onto a pc. Also supplied in the box is an av cable so all your masterpieces can be viewed on your tv. The camera runs on 3 AAA batteries which are not included and even good quality batteries do not last very long.

I was extremely happy with this camera for a few weeks, but then things started to go seriously wrong. First, all the writing on the LCD screen went backwards, which I thought was rather bizaar but I put it down to the cheapness of the camera. Next to go was the picture quality, becoming very grainy and dark. The camera became very temperamental  refusing to come on or just randomly turning itself off. Then a week later it wouldn't turn on at all. At this point I had only been using it for around a month. I dug out the warranty information and emailed the company explaining the problems I had been experiencing. An email was sent back asking me to check the batteries were correctly inserted and fully charged. I replied assuring them I knew the basic concept of how batteries worked and that I was positive that this was not the problem. I was then advised to package up the camera include proof of purchase and return it, which I did. Two weeks later a brand new camera appeared on my doorstep and I was happy once more. Surely this had been a one off, maybe the last camera just had a defect. A few weeks later I began experiencing the same problems and since then the camera has just died. I considered sending it back again, but it had cost me £5.00 to return the camera last time which had not been refunded, so I thought it be best to cut my losses and buy the more expensive one I had my eye on.

Did I expect brillant things from a camera that cost £25? No, but I did expect it to last for more than a month. When the camera was working I actually really liked it and I thought the customer service I received was good, hence the two stars. To be honest though I think this is extremely generous for a camera that only lasted for such a small amount of time.