The Aiptek DV3100

The Aiptek DV3100 is a small, lightweight 2 megapixel (3.1 megapixel interpolated) digital camera / digital camcorder. It comes with a cable to transfer the pictures and movies to your computer and a cable to play the pictures and movies back through a TV or VCR. It even comes with a small tripod.

I bought mine at Circuit City for $130.00. I had an Aiptek mini Mega 1.3 before and was very impressed with it, so I was comfortable buying an Aiptek again. I needed a higher-resolution toy, er, camera for my web site development, so I used my birthday as a means to justify the purchase.

I'm very happy with the camera so far. It has both optical and color LCD viewfinders, will focus down to 11 inches, takes movies with sound, and accepts Compact Flash cards up to 512 megs. I bought a 256 meg card at walmart.com because they were considerably less expensive on their web site than they are in their stores. As far as battery consumption goes, I took about 150 megs of movies and around 100 pictures before the two AA batteries that came with it got low. Since the batteries that normally come with electronic equipment aren't usually very good ones, I think that's pretty good.

The only two negaive points that I can think of are that it doesn't have a flash and that I would like a way to turn the sound off that it makes when it turns on and off.

Movies taken with the camera:

Here is a movie out the window of our company jet.

Here is a movie of our fancy hamburger lunch inside our company jet. The frame rate of this camera is not very fast, so you shouldn't pan the camera as fast as I did here.