Image Album: photos / 2001-07-15 -- fun with Aiptek PenCam

Album Description

Just before my Dad had to go on a long business trip to Canada, my Mom gave him a (very) inexpensive digital camera, the Aiptek PenCam Trio VGA. The camera produces... um... "sub-professional-quality" results when used as a regular digital camera, as you can see on these photos my Dad and brother took in Vancouver, but the camera is actually kind of fun if you use its shortcomings to creative effect. (Apparently I'm not the only one to think this way, as I've become aware of sites like loficam where many of the photos shared are ones where the el-cheapo digicam artifacted in an interesting way.)

Below are a couple of the test photos I shot after unpacking the PenCam. The flower picture, especially, turned out really wild — be sure and view its full-size .jpg. In case you're wondering what these huge .bmp files are doing here, that's the format the camera (wastefully) stores its grainy pictures in. Apparently they felt they couldn't do compression at this price point.

Instructions

Simply click on any file size figure to get a page with just that image, including its caption (if any), a toggle for additional info (e.g. EXIF data), and arrow buttons that will take you to the previous and next images. Clicking on the "File" column heading will expand the table below to include inline thumbnails. Clicking on one of the other column headings will get you a page containing ALL the images in that particular file format and size, with their captions (if any) printed alongside them.

Images

File .bmp: Normal .jpg: Thumbnail .jpg: Normal
Aiptek01-1-otherworldly_flowers 921.7 kB
(640 x 480)
2.7 kB
(80 x 60)
84.1 kB
(640 x 480)
Aiptek01-2-floating_spirit_lamp 921.7 kB
(640 x 480)
2.8 kB
(80 x 60)
81.2 kB
(640 x 480)


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Dan Harkless
Album last modified: August 3, 2025
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