Picture quality – If you are picky about how your child’s images turn out, you may want to rethink this segment of cameras. Forget about proper metering: these cameras will only take good pictures if taken in perfect lighting. The four cameras we reviewed have minimal resolution and the pictures look like they came from off a cheap cell phone camera. Of all the cameras we looked at, the Digital Blue Snap camera had the most resolution at 1.3 megapixels and took the clearest pictures – in perfect conditions (although colors are another matter entirely). Lighting and movement are major players in how to pictures turn out, not just for the Snap camera but all of them. The subject has to be completely still. The light needs to be bright (to avoid those awful flashes!) and the photographer has to be still – a seemingly impossible task for most young kids. The Kid-Tough camera has an interpolation feature that expands the resolution to 1280 x 960 pixels, but adds graininess to the image. This feature is supposed to make for better prints, but this doesn’t necessarily make them better – only bigger. All of the cameras we tested lacked real image quality. The Digital Blue Snap camera had the best resolution by far but the most inaccurate colors and the most noise in the images. The Vtech Kidizoom fared well in most testing, but produced the least detail in our resolution test. The following chart shows how the four kid cameras stack up against each other when it comes to actual image quality. The resolution addresses how much detail shows up in an image. The noise describes the speckled grain that appears in most images, becoming more visible in low light. The exposure refers to how well the camera adjusts to light and properly meters and exposes subjects. The saturation relates to the colors; colors that are over-saturated tend to pop out a little more and look a bit more flattering, while under-saturated colors tend to look dull and flat. We didn’t rank them because it’s a matter of preference, but here are the results of our testing (done by adults, thank you very much). 

As you can see, there is no clear winner just by checking out the chart; it looks like a mixed bag. Tallying up the rankings as if they were points (and assuming that all of these aspects of image quality are equally important to you), the Vtech Kidizoom is the winner. The Fisher-Price Kid-Tough comes in second, the Digital Blue Snap camera in third, and the Npower Diego camera finishing last. The Diego camera certainly deserves to be last; it shows strange horizontal lines running through all of its images – yuck! 

Flash – One problem that all the cameras had was an overpowering flash. This, coupled with tiny photographers who like to get way too close to their subjects, made for a lot of blown-out images. White. All we would see is white. The Fisher-Price Kid-Tough camera has a completely automated flash, so you can’t turn it off at all. The flash comes with a warning in the user guide: “For flash pictures, make sure your picture subject is no further than 7.5 feet away” but no closer than 4 feet. The Vtech Kidizoom, which also has an automated flash, has a published range that is a little closer: 3-6 feet. But both cameras still produced plenty of white shots. The Diego digital camera has an automated flash but doesn’t seem to use it as liberally as the previously mentioned kid cams. Still, it is powerful when it does go off and leaves faces as white ghosts. The Digital Blue Snap camera is the only one of the bunch that allows you to turn the flash off and on along with the automated setting. This is handy. The range on this flash seems to reach a bit farther than the other cameras – about as far as 10 feet. But once again, if your kids are prone to shooting subjects at close range, all their shots are going to be a white soup. Since none of the flashes really perform well, I’m going to award the Best Flash prize to the Snap camera because at least you can turn it off!

Macro – Most young kids don’t understand the concept of composition in photography. Out of all of my son’s pictures from all the cameras he used, about 80 percent of them were of stationary objects (Candy Land game pieces, other cameras, Batman action figures, cars, and plastic dinosaurs were his favorites) at close range. Sometimes “close range” meant 6 inches and other times it meant 3 feet. But rarely did he venture farther than about 4 feet from his subjects. This presents a problem with the kid cameras, as many of them can’t focus that close up. Take, for example, the Kid-Tough. It can focus only as close as 4 feet! It’s no wonder all of my son’s pictures came out blurry and he moved on to another camera. The Kidizoom does much better, focusing as close as 1.5 feet. The Diego cam isn’t far behind at 1.64 feet. Unfortunately the tween Snap camera isn’t so hot in the macro department; it looks as if it can only focus on subjects that are more than three feet from the lens. Don’t plan on close-up shots of flowers from this camera.