This Is One of the Stupidest Cameras Ever Made and I Love It

If you dream of owning a Hasselblad XPan, you might want to consider this much more affordable alternative. Or, given how stupid it is, maybe not.

Beyond "London" and "about 15 years ago," I'm not quite sure when, where, or why I picked up the Vivitar IC 101. I do, however, remember acquiring it for not very much money, chucking in a roll of film, getting about halfway through, and then letting it disappear into the attic. A few months ago, it resurfaced, so with my freshly renewed love of analog, I finished the roll and sent it off to the lab to be developed with the vague hope that something might come back. The results have proven interesting.

A Trip to Nicaragua

In 2010, I was commissioned by a Russian company to go and photograph parkour in Managua (don't ask). For what was possibly one of the most random jobs of my life, it seems that I decided to take the Vivitar along for the ride. Good work, Past Andy. I'm guessing that the roll took a few trips through the airport scanners, so it's even more impressive that the images aren't worse than they are.

Random Efforts to Finish the Roll

My memory is patchy at the best of times, so it's been fun to discover that Past Andy made several other attempts to get through all 36 exposures, the first being a trip to England's Peak District (three frames), the Baltic coast (four frames), and the Polish mountains (just one frame, you lazy sod).

Last summer, when the canola was in full bloom here in the French countryside, I threw it in the car to remind me to burn through the last few snaps in a final push to finish the film and get it developed. A combination of airport scanners, wildly fluctuating temperatures in various attics, and the passage of 16 years all mean image quality is not what it once was, and it wasn't great to begin with. The fading light probably didn't help with color reproduction, but I'm just grateful that this roll of Kodak Whateveritis (GoldColorMax?) has produced any images at all, never mind so many fantastic memories.

The Vivitar IC 101: A Gloriously Stupid Camera from a Weird and Wonderful Company

It's hard to find much information beyond the specs for this bizarre little oddity. At first glance, it's a bog-standard point-and-shoot:

• A nice wide 28mm lens
• A single shutter speed of 1/125th of a second
• A fixed aperture of f/8

The cheap plastic feels solidly put together, at least, and it comes with a few luxuries:

• A sliding lens cover that also disables the shutter button (stopping you from firing off shots while it's in your pocket)
• A wrist strap
• A frame counter

Of course, as you will have noticed from the images, what makes this camera unique is the panoramic format. How is this possible in a plastic point-and-shoot camera, you might well ask? Well, it's definitely not the same approach as the Hasselblad XPan that effectively uses a lens with an image circle on par with medium format in order to create an image on 35mm film that's 65 mm wide.

Vivitar's innovative approach? Take a regular 35mm camera and block the top and bottom of the frame.

That's right. There's plastic on the film gate to matte the vertical height of the 35mm frame down to about 10 mm. That expensive roll of film you just put in the camera? The Vivitar IC 101 pretends that more than half of it doesn't exist. Ingenious. (And yes, you can effectively "fix" this camera with some determination, too much free time, and a sharp knife. People actually do this.)

Beyond "at some point in the 1990s," there’s not much information to be had about production. Vivitar itself was then based on the West Coast of the US, although the camera was almost certainly farmed out for production somewhere in China.

Those who have been in the game for more than a few years will know the Vivitar name, at least. I remember my first off-camera flash was the Vivitar 285, an upgrade of the legendary Vivitar 283, of which Vivitar is said to have sold more than three million units. The company, dating back to 1938, has a proud place in photographic history, and today, the company’s About page says that it’s “the largest supplier of digital still cameras, camcorders and accessories around the world.” It currently sells a wide variety of products, including 64-megapixel cameras with 10x optical zoom, automatic soap dispensers, and Barbie quad bikes. Amazing.

Recent Adventures

As though to make up for the one, sad, solitary frame that I mustered in the Polish mountains about ten years ago, I took the IC 101 with me on a recent ski trip to Białka Tatrzańska. I wanted something relatively small, lightweight, and fun for the slopes, as well as a camera that I could pass to anyone with hands and say, "Just point it and push the button." With no settings, no battery to drain in the cold conditions, and nothing to focus, I couldn't really go wrong.

Except that halfway through the trip, the shutter button stopped working. After fiddling around and wasting five or six frames, I realized that if I pushed the button while also wiggling the film advance wheel, the shutter would activate. I had my beloved Olympus XA along with me to fill the gaps, so I had something reliable when I absolutely wanted to capture a shot, but for random snowy snaps, the IC 101, once convinced to cooperate, proved to be a good option (assuming you find the overlapping frames endearing rather than annoying).

Should You Buy One?

Almost certainly, no, you should not. It's awful. Image quality is interesting (aka poor), it wastes ungodly amounts of film, and it seems that the internal mechanism is made mostly of cornflakes. However, as is often the case when it comes to analog, its innumerable flaws are also what make it so enjoyable. These cameras are gloriously cheap, plentiful, and you'll find a ton of them sold "as new," inside the original packaging, for next to nothing. Five to 15 dollars seems to be the going rate on eBay, and if you pay more, you've been had.

My Next Roll

Given its fixed shutter speed and aperture, this is a camera that's best reserved for bright days, although I seem to have managed a decent mixture of exposures from the roll of Kodak Gold that came on the ski trip. Interior shots are "characterful" if lacking in detail, and some of the brightest shots needed a lot of work in Negative Lab Pro to wind in the exposure, but a combination of the latitude of the film and me not giving too much of a damn about image quality means that I got results that I'm happy with. Kodak Gold or Color for the approaching summer months will be my next choice, and I'll throw this in my bag for random adventures. When autumn arrives, I'll throw in a roll of Fomapan 400 to embrace the grain.

This time around, I'll try not to repeat my trick of getting ten frames into a roll of 36 exposures and then forgetting for 16 years that it exists. Let's see.