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| No-nothing cameras or sleeping beauties? Read the story, examine our tests, and you’ll be surprised. |
With all of today’s automatic luxuries, even in budget SLRs—e.g., focusing, loading, winding and rewinding, exposure and bracketing, plus built-in flash—would you even consider a Chinese-designed SLR without any of these features?
Probably not. Yet every year, the tail end of our annual SLR chart contains a gaggle of these beasts that somebody must love. Even though I seem to have ignored their existence, I felt it was time to find out just how good, bad, or dreadful they were, and discover who would possibly want them. Be prepared for the unexpected.
I cherry-picked the least expensive models ($160 street) bearing the Phoenix and Vivitar names: the Phoenix P-2000 with 28–80mm f/3.5–5.6 Phoenix lens and the Vivitar V3800N with 28–70mm f/3.4–4.8 MC lens. But let’s wring out the bodies first.
There is no Phoenix or Vivitar camera factory. Both bear the importers’ brand names, and are the brainchildren of Chinese engineering based on Japanese camera designs of 20 or so years ago. Looking at the prices, you might expect plastic bodies. Not so. Each has a supersolid, all-metal chassis with polycarbonate top, bottom, and hinged back, metal lensmount, and the trim, angular external cosmetics of the midlevel cameras of their origin.
Looking through the viewfinders of both will give you a shock. Perhaps you’ve forgotten how big, bright, and clear a first-class glass-prism focusing image used to be (before engineers realized that mirror prisms were far less expensive, even though image magnification and brightness suffer slightly). It would be hard to beat the quality and efficiency of the finder systems in each camera, no matter the price. The
Phoenix’s finder image magnification with a 50mm lens (our standard) tested out to be a whopping 0.92X (excellent), and its screen image finder area was 89 percent of the actual picture area (very good), with no parallax error detected. The Vivitar provided an even greater 0.93X (excellent) and, again, an 89-percent image finder area with no parallax error. All of these figures are superior to most other SLRs we’ve tested, save top-of-the-line professional cameras—and even there, the image magnifications of the Phoenix and Vivitar are often superior.
The Phoenix has a horizontally split optical rangefinder plus microprism collar, while the Vivitar uses a diagonally split rangefinder and microprism collar. The entire finder screen areas of both can be easily used for manual focusing, which is more than can be said for most AF SLRs. Both cameras have good centerweighted TTL metering, convenient depth-of-field-preview lever, provision for making multiple exposures, PC-sync terminal and hot-shoe, and the ability to accept threaded cable releases; each is powered by two 1.5-volt alkaline or 1.55V silver-oxide button cells, or one 3V lithium.
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