I.    Durability – The Fisher Price Kid-Tough Camera wins this contest with a big body-slam. Its motto is “built to last drop, after drop, after drop” and it comes with a picture of the camera bouncing down stairs on the packaging. That’s just asking for it. So we tried it. We dropped it from about three feet – about the height kids will carry it at - onto a hard floor. The camera fared well, turning on and taking pictures as if nothing had happened. The camera’s casing is a sturdy, thick plastic that has thick rubber gripping material around the outer edges; the camera body didn’t dent at all from the drop. Only the Vtech Kidizoom rivals the Kid-Tough in its chunkiness and durability, but the Kid-Tough gets the edge with its waterproof designation. A little spill or a dip in a fishbowl won’t stop the Kid-Tough from taking pictures. The user manual says the camera can dip to 3.3 feet for up to 30 minutes, but points out that the camera isn’t designed for underwater photography. We tested out the camera’s waterproof capabilities by running it under water in the sink, and then immersing it for four minutes. After the dip, we wiped it with a dry cloth and powered it up. It turned on and even took pictures – something that the Kid-Tough sometimes had trouble with even when dry. There were still a few drops of water in the little nooks and crannies of the handgrip, so I let the camera dry by a window for 15 minutes. I was particularly interested to see if the battery compartment stayed dry. Indeed, when I opened it up the rubber seal on the inside kept all the water out. Truly waterproof. While the Kid-Tough functioned after its swim, the pictures we took in the water were awful; perhaps that’s why Fisher-Price says the camera isn’t designed for underwater photography. Still, the Kid-Tough wins the contest for physical durability with its sturdy, waterproof body.

II.    Ease of use – All of these digital cameras are kid-friendly point-and-shoots, so they are all very easy to use. It is very simple to take pictures with all four of the cameras; the differences come when reviewing photos. On the Kid-Tough, all you have to do is push the arrow buttons on the right and left sides of the screen. Even young toddlers picked this up fast; they want to look at pictures of themselves, of course. Reviewing pictures is a bit less intuitive on the Kidizoom, but is easy to catch onto. All you need to do is scroll up or down on the joystick. The Diego camera uses a jittery little rotary button that surrounds the power button. The rotary doesn’t fully rotate though; it feels like it’s jammed so you have to keep pushing it upward like a light switch that just won’t stay on. On the Snap camera, there is a playback mode button and a multi-selector – the same setup on most adult compact digital cameras. All in all, the most intuitive digital camera award goes to the uber-simplified Fisher-Price Kid-Tough.

III.    Interface – All of these cameras have a fairly simple interface consisting mainly of a power button, shutter button, and a way to review images on the LCD screen. The Fisher-Price Kid-Tough has a very simple interface but the buttons themselves are harder to push than they should be – especially the tiny shutter button on the front. The Vtech Kidizoom’s buttons are much easier to push, but there are more of them. This didn’t seem to scare off my son at all though; after a 30-second tutorial he could not only take and review images but he could play games too. The Npower Diego camera has gigantic buttons on the front that are fabulous for little fingers; the shutter button is on one side and a “smile” button on the other. On the back, however, there are smaller controls that are recessed into the camera body and don’t give your fingers much feedback when you push on them. Preschoolers will be able to take pictures but will have a harder time reviewing them. The Digital Blue Snap camera has a pared down interface that looks more like an adult compact camera. The buttons are glossy and protrude slightly so you can feel them even while staring at the subject in front of you. There is a zoom control that rocks back and forth – the left side zooms out and the right side zooms in. Little kids may have a hard time understanding that a single button can do different things depending on where exactly you push it. There are also small icons by the other controls that preschoolers won’t get: self-timer, flash, and playback, for instance. This camera’s a great segway from kid cameras to adult models though. Overall, the easiest layout is the Kid-Tough, but the ease of use award goes to the Kidizoom because its buttons are much easier to press for little fingers.

IV.    LCD screen – The LCD screen is perhaps the most important feature to my kid. He doesn’t buy the one- or two-eyed viewfinder business; he just wants to look at that LCD screen the same way he zones out in front of the television. Most kids want to take pictures and then immediately look at the image they took. That is the beauty of a digital camera. The Vtech Kidizoom has the best LCD screen. It is larger at 1.8 inches and has better resolution than the other cameras we looked at. The Fisher-Price Kid-Tough camera has a 1.6-inch screen that isn’t great, but is better than the other two options. The Digital Blue Snap camera has a smaller 1.4-inch screen that has about the same resolution as the Kid-Tough. The Npower Diego digital camera fares the worst. Its LCD is also 1.4 inches across, and its resolution is worse than the screens on cell phones from the late Nineties.

“Diego” Npower flash jr. Rugged Digital Camera	Vtech Kidizoom Camera
Digital Blue Snap Digital Camera	Fisher-Price Kid-Tough Camera

V.    Value – the Vtech is definitely the best value. Its pictures are among the best in this group and it can do way more than just take pictures. It records video, plays games, and edits photos. Any toy that is versatile enough to snap a few pictures and keep my kid quiet on an airplane is worth at least $59.99. The Vtech Kidizoom is among the most expensive in this group, but is far more functional than any of them. The least expensive is the $30 bar-of-soap Digital Blue Snap Camera, but little kids can hardly handle this gadget because it’s so small and slippery. If you have a school-aged child or even a tween who isn’t interested in playing tic-tac-toe on a chunky camera, the Snap camera may be your best value.

VI.    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! 

VII. 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!

VIII. 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.

IX. Battery power – The Vampire Award goes to the Fisher-Price Kid-Tough for sucking the batteries dry in a few short hours of play (even with an auto shut-off feature that turns off the camera within a minute of inactivity; all four cameras have this feature). To heighten the frustration, there is a battery indicator that appears for only a few minutes before the camera tanks. The Fisher-Price web site displays dozens of reviews from angry parents describing their sobbing children after batteries died and pictures were lost. Rechargeable batteries are in order for this little sucker, and they will need to be charged often. The Kid-Tough uses four AAA batteries to keep afloat, while all the other cameras we reviewed used AA batteries. The Diego camera lasts much longer, but doesn’t display a battery indicator until the batteries are nearly drained. The tween Snap camera has an indicator and seems to conserve batteries with an occasional picture here and there, but if you’re headed on vacation, pack a few extra AAs. This little camera takes only two AA batteries while the rest of the cameras required four cells. Winning the battery efficiency award is the Vtech Kidizoom, which uses four AA batteries that lasted three times longer than the Kid-Tough’s with about three times the amount of use and functionality.
 

(Note the two cameras on the left - the Vtech Kidizoom and Npower Diego -  require
screwdrivers to access the battery compartment)