Digital Cameras for Children

I’ve been considering getting Gavin a camera because he always wants mine whenever I take it out to take photos.  He’s also been taking a lot of self-portraits using my mobile phone camera.  Although I am keen to encourage his new-found interest, I’m afraid I get worried he’ll press the delete button or drop the camera.

We’ve made him a few “pretend” cameras using pieces of his Duplo blocks and he runs around the house pretending to take photos of everything.  He’s even taken my SIL’s bf’s mobile phone and taken pictures of everyone and everything in the house.

Since I’ve always believed it is good to encourage a child’s passion, I have been quite keen to get him a proper camera that he can use – one that I don’t have to worry about if he accidentally drops it or delete all the photos.  So I finally googled children’s cameras to see what was available.  My criteria was simple.  It had to be:

• child-proof
• user-friendly
• age-appropriate
• able to take real photos
• have a display so Gavin could view the photos he had just taken

Z Recommends had a great one on children’s cameras.  Based on their list, I managed to narrow it down to either the Fisher Price Kid Tough Digital Camera (shown below) or the Vtech Kidizoom digital camera.  Both were recommended for toddlers around age 3.  Based on their features, I thought the Fisher Price camera was a better bet – it met all my basic requirements and the picture quality was also better.  Unfortunately, the price is kind of steep for a toy camera – even if it is one that works…

Based purely on the pictures of the camera, Gavin also agreed that he preferred the Fisher Price camera.

There were also a couple of recommendations on About.com.  The two which caught my were the Digital Blue U-turn Camera (don’t worry, it comes in blue as well):

And the Digital Blue Lego Camera:

Again Gavin prefers the Lego camera.  I think this is purely because it’s Lego – a toy he’s familiar with and enjoys playing with.  Based on the write up, however, it sounds like a crappy camera.  Between the Lego and the U-turn, it appears the U-turn is superior.  Even then the U-turn is still severely limited, according to the reviewer.  Additionally, the reviewer feels the the U-turn would be slightly more of a challenge for very young children to use – not exactly what I am looking for.

So it looks like the Fisher Price camera is the best bet for a toddler like Gavin…