Fisher price kid tough digital camera
I picked up a Kid Tough Digital Camera for kaily as one of her main presents this year.
She always has a bit of fun trying to take over my dSLR, and is always a good sport for posing for pictures (but only for that .5 second you have her attention). I thought it might be fun to giver her a bit more time on the other side of the lens with something a little less fragile. To be fair, aside from leaving it on the floor for me to trip on, she has actually been pretty careful with the Kid tough camera (just going to say KTC from here on out) so far, so a more breakable one might not have been the end of the world. Still, time and running might tell a different story.
The Fisher Price KTC camera gets a couple things really right and a lot of things really wrong. The bad things are mostly from what I can see, Fisher Price just totally cutting every corner possible on the guts, I guess they don’t think kids should get a good quality indoor shot.
I put it into high res mode (such as it is) and slapped in a 128 SD card I had lying around for Kaily to get going.
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I shot the bellow one just to measure the KTC against a slightly steadier hand, and get a feel for the write delay (minimal but it’s so low res even at high res that is not a huge surprise).
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I touched up all the pictures slightly in aperture, and discarded about thirty or so totally unusable ones (hey her average is already better then mine 
).
What’s good about the KTC:
- Constructions is pretty decent. It’s rugged and has a good rubberized grip. The unit fits kaily well now but will scale decently until probable around 5 or 6, though I’m sure I will have replaced it by then if she is shooting.
- She liked the pink girly look , and seemed to feel comfortable just getting going. Once I managed to scrounge up some batteries that is. Yeah, the 4 AA’s are not included for the $60 (or more) bucks. Not shocking but annoying given I have bought VCR’s for less that have the batteries. It dose have the lithium that preservers the memory for battery swaps. I wouldn’t mind the battery thing so much if I felt that the money had ended being invested back into the product.
- The button driven UI is very usable. This is done so well that my almost four year old only had be shown the deal once. She hasn’t figured out the delete key, but she gets power, and the scroll buttons to see what she shot. That is very cool. I give the engineer who kept it functional and simple a thumbs up on that part.
- Very low digital delay. It pretty much has no perceivable digital delay but this at some sacrifice and as I mentioned it’s dam low resolution to begin with. There is a slight delay so you can get motion blur but jitter is low and it certainly seems to be responsive (but the difference in quality of results where you treat it like it it’s slow rather then snap and move is huge). The end result though seemed to make kaily happy in that she can just click away, or only has to wait on flash, not that she does.
Where it bombs,
- Ok seriously, I know I have high standards… but the internals on this thing are total crap. The sensor is just awful, in fact it’s almost unbelievable bad. I have literally had free give away point and shoots digitals that have much higher quality sensors and over all components. I could go buy a sub $70 digital at retail that would kill the KTC in every way, but would eschew the supposed kid toughness and the simple UI design (though kaily can use my iPhone ok too so it’s not exactly rocket science make something a kid can use). Processing for it’s own flash back scatter is just horrendous, as an example. Mass pixilation and banding in any shadow. I like grainy film but not when it’s the only choice
. - The auto focus is to slow, especially for kids who want to snap shots. Zero ability to do any kind of sudo macro work or close ups with flash.
- 8 megs internal? Come on. I can pick 128 meg SD for like $5 bucks at fry’s. Lucky I have a few sitting around from a 5 year old Treo… cheap cheap cheap. Better to just through in a cheap stick and drop the internal altogether IMO.
- The double view finder seems kind of redundant, I noticed kaily tends to close one eye just out of habit but it might be a good feature for some kids, though not sure it will serve them long term. I would rather a single, brighter view finder that has marks for centering and maybe some hud indicators. Kids are smart giving them some tools. The view finder it’s self only seems to do a so so job of actually framing what the camera is pointing at anyway.
- The LCD is just awful, it is the mots grainy low resolution LCD I have seen in maybe 10 years. I swear to god it’s like 4 color CGI or something. Just awful. Almost useless for framing and display. Kaily doesn’t seem to mind at all, but it makes my eyes hurt. There is no way that I can find that cool given the cost, hell even at half the cost I would a problem with it.
- For it’s simplicity it’s a missing a few things like turning off the flash. I get why they left that out though along with any other kind of standard adjustment. I can’t help but think though that if the LCD didn’t suck so much they could have crammed some stuff into a parents menu to give a lot more flexibility, and ultimately value for pennies.
- Battery drain. One day of playing around and it’s already sporting a low battery warning. Probable just the flash, still it’s nutty, kaily shot no more then 40 or pictures with flash on maybe half. Probable less, I wasn’t really watching how many I dumped but there was not that many. Is Fisher Price owned by Energizer or something, yikes?
Despite the rather long list of foibles Kaily is ticked silly by the KTC and spent some time tonight, trying, to shoot her dolls. I wonder how much more she would have liked it if Fisher Price tried just a little harder to give folks some value on the internal parts instead of only some external design.
Bottom line: Sure if you have the cash and no expectations around the quality of image it will produce. Ideally I would buy used from ebay for half or a quarter the price, add a used SD card and you are batting much closer to where the value proposition really comes in at. It’s a toy but didn’t have to be. That said, if your growing a little shutter bug and want something that might survive a few spills there is some value with the KTC.