Ritz PV2 “Single Use” Cameras

For a little while now people, myself included (though intermittently due to other committments), have been working on getting the newer Ritz PV2 cameras unlocked so that they can be used as cheap digital cameras. This is not so much because they have stunning image quality (most, if not all of us have much, much better quality digital cameras already). Part of it is for the challenge. For me though there was also an element of being able to give a cheap camera to a couple of young kids I know and have them play with photography.

The PV2 is ideal for this since it has an LCD (enabling them to see the photo they’ve just taken immediately), it is cheap (no real loss if it gets broken), it runs on standard AA batteries and it was designed to survive well enough to be recycled by the store (and they are in a pretty tough plastic case).

Recently, there has been a bit of a breakthrough and the camera can now be reprogrammed a little bit so that an easily available Windows (and Mac OS X for that matter) driver can read the photos from them and reset the counter to zero allowing the camera to be used again. You can get more information about this from a number of places:

I’m sure I’ve missed some. Almost all of those pages have links to other sites though so keep following them. There’s a lot of information out there. The I-Applicance forums are perhaps the most up-to-date, but they can be a little difficult to follow these days since there is so much activity there.

2 thoughts on “Ritz PV2 “Single Use” Cameras

  1. I unlocked a CVS red PV2 and then uploaded the Flash data to a CVS Blue and it worked. the lcd is fubar and it beeps in a lower regester but u/l d/l pics is fine.

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