The Best Camera For Toddlers and Young Children

This review has been superseded by our 2007 Kids' Digital Camera Showdown, a comparative review of four kids' digital cameras, including an updated version of the Fisher-Price Kid-Tough Digital Camera reviewed in its older model here. To read this updated review of the Fisher-Price camera as well as the VTech Kidizoom, Polaroid Pixie, and National Geographic Digital World Camera, including detailed image quality and feature comparisons and Top Pick recommendations for children ages 2-8, click here.

Jenni and I have been wanting to give Z a chance to take pictures for a while now, which should not be surprising considering our shared engagement in visual thinking (her/me). Jenni owes her love of photography to her grandmother, who introduced her to the black & white darkroom at an early age; I have long been fascinated by the kinds of photographs young children take. We came around to the idea that although we do a lot of film photography in our household, the immediacy of digital photography - the power to upload photos from camera or card to computer and to send photos via email or post to a blog or on a web page - was a valuable way to helping a young child understand what they were doing when they took pictures, rather than having to send film through a lab to get prints. After that initial realization, made at around Z's second birthday, we spent five months researching the few options parents have for digital cameras that are suitable for young children.

The three key features to consider turned out to be picture quality, ease of use, and durability; like the old adage about speed, quality, and price, you get to pick two, but you can't have all three. We decided on the Fisher-Price Kid-Tough Digital Camera. We went ahead and bought a $20 SD card (the camera itself will store 50 or so images, which may be plenty for your needs) and have no need of the camera upload software, since we're Mac-based. Here's what the camera has to offer:

• A truly durable body. Z dropped this camera twice in its first day of use alone. This is just plain reality for a two-year-old and I doubt it will change anytime soon. The plastic housing is well-designed to both make the camera easy for little hands to manipulate and to protect all of the delicate camera parts without making the whole camera cumbersome. It really is a nice design.
• Toddler-friendly picture-taking. A small LCD screen gives little clue to picture quality but does help a user compose a photo. The viewfinder is in stereo to make looking through it pretty intuitive.
  
• The right basic features. The camera has no manual settings - not even a manual option for the flash - but it does give kids the power to flip through stored photographs and delete them if desired. Deletion is simple - click the delete button once and a trash can with a question mark appears on the screen; click again and the picture is gone. Our advice to parents would be to give up on trying to train very young children not to delete their pictures, opting instead for frequent uploads.
• Decent picture quality. We're not going to say it's great, but this is the feature we finally recognized we'd need to compromise on in order to get a camera suitable for a toddler. That being said, it's really not bad. The camera takes 640x480-pixel photographs, which basically means that if you want to order prints from your toddler's pictures, you will be able to tell that they look bad, even if your toddler can't. We're happy, with this trainer camera, to have them look good for online use. Beyond picture books, Z lives much of her media-life online anyway, between YouTube, Starfall, and this blog; why should photography be any different, at least while she's still too young to be shown her way around a darkroom? The flash has a range of four feet, but you're best off using bright lighting indoors to get good shots.
  

If you would rather compromise elsewhere, you can get a camera with better picture quality. You can get a less durable kids' digital camera for $30 (Barbie and Barbie-free) and you could get a cheaper but decent-quality 35mm camera with true film quality which would be less durable but more easily replaced.

Film cameras do also open up a few other options for experimentation, especially for a slightly older child; Holgas are always fun for creative black-and-white photos (the film is 120mm, and the cameras produce vignetted photographs and often have "interesting" light leaks besides), and even underwater cameras aren't that expensive these days when you're taking about 35mm film. In short, if the child you're buying the camera for is older, more responsible, or more technologically fluent than your average toddler, if you have easy access to a photo lab for rapid processing and would rather spend your money on that end, or face some combination of those circumstances, then you may decide to trust your kid with a camera that might break when they drop it, or one that is less intuitive to use and take pictures with. But for a toddler we felt it was most important that she have a camera she could truly treat as a toy without us holding our breaths every time she picked it up, or - worse, in our minds - inviting us to restrict, limit, or otherwise control its use.

Likewise, there is really no reason to assume that a child of two, three, or four is mentally or physically prepared to "study" a technology that does not come to them naturally. We expect that computers and other electronics speak to us in a language that we can understand, with "desktops," "folders," and an entire system of references meaningless to the system itself; why not likewise demand that electronics like cameras for kids be designed for their level of understanding?

In this regard, the Fisher-Price camera not only met but exceeded our expectations, with design features that had a real impact on the camera's kid-friendliness level. All of the buttons, for example, make noises designed to help the child understand and appreciate what they're doing with the camera - the on/off switch makes a rising or falling gurgling noise depending on whether the camera is being turned on or off, and the shutter release makes an exaggerated clicking noise. Other subtle features also help make this camera easy to use. The camera takes a second to turn on, but pressing the button impatiently while waiting for it to come to life doesn't cause it to shut back down again. And the camera automatically turns itself off after a brief period of inactivity. The shutdown saves battery life if the child is really done, but the sound invites the child to pick the camera up again if they really want to be taking pictures. All of these features have a tangible effect on our daughter's interest in engaging with this unfamiliar toy.

Our next post on toddler photography will share a few photographs Z has taken with her new camera. We'll also offer some surprising info on what we're doing to help our toddler understand how much fun it is to take pictures!