Customer Reviews

Fisher Price Kid Tough Digital Camera - Blue

5 star:		(31)
4 star:		(21)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

We bought this without expecting too much (after having problems with a cheaper camera), and this is a good camera for young children 3+

What's good?
- physical Design makes it easy to look through and hold, robust construction,
- Simple contols, kids easily learned the User Interface and how to take photos. Has simple sounds as well that accompony power on/off, shutter
- the one we bought took a standard 128MB SD card which provides heaps of storage for photos of this size
- no PC drivers required - mounts as a standard USB storage device

Needs improvement:
- picture quality - its OK, but very basic. Sort of 1MP phone quality.
- rear display - fairly poor, but workable.
- Some troubles getting it detected by WinXP on our notebook, but with repititon it worked

Overall:
- Great learning toy for the kids to figure out what photography is. They copy what adults do, and this is a great way to learn. They have learnt if you take lots of pictures, you have to sort through them and delete the cruddy ones. How to compose a photo. And they learn about composing photos and what photos look like if you just press the shutter button at any time.

The picture quality is only part of it - it is the overall experience that matters. The simple User Interface and durable design mean that this is a toy that kids should get some life out of. Reccomended (though a higher picture quality version would be nice!).

Note: - there is a high quality mode which needs to be turned on. Press both arrow keys and press the shutter button which turns on a cross hatched pattern symbol in the lower left of the display. Pictures instead of being 640 x 480 are 1280 x 960. I don't know whether this is a higher quality or just interpolated, but it looks worthwhile having.

After spending a lot of time researching digital cameras for little kids, we decided on the Kid Tough camera. The downside to buying a camera rugged enough for a young child is that the resolutions are terrible. At least the KT camera rates at 1 megapixel, unlike several others that have .3 megapixels which is borderline pointless. Because of the lower resolutions, the pictures are comparable to cell photo photos, but that's been perfectly peachy for us so far.

There is no question that the camera is rugged - it has already been dropped about 20 times and still works like new. Hooking it up to my Mac or my husband's PC has been very easy (although be aware the creativity software is PC only).

Here are the negatives:

1. The flash is way too bright, and it overexposed almost every photo. We fixed this by taking a small square of a paper towel and placing it over the flash with a piece of clear packing tape. It works beautifullly as a diffuser.

2. The delete button is too easy for little kids to hit. In future versions, FP should make it very difficult for little kids to delete pictures. Let mom and dad do the deleting.

3. Would it kill any of these manufacturers to make software Mac compatible?

All in all, I would definitely recommend the camera to any parent looking for a rugged camera for their toddler/young elementary aged kids.

We bought this camera for our son's 3rd birthday. He had an old camera of ours that didn't work so he was excited to have his own, especially since it worked. It's a very cool and simple to use camera. Within about 5 minutes of opening it and looking at it with dad, he understood what the buttons did and was clicking away taking pictures. It's super easy to upload the pictures onto our computer and the picture quality is much better once loaded onto the computer.
Another cool thing (that I didn't notice when I bought it) is the binocular eye piece. I think it would have been hard for him if it wasn't.
This is a great camera - it's very cool to see what he takes pictures of and especially those everyday things that you can now see from a 3-year-old's perspective. If you have a kid who is even a little interested in pictures and photography I think this is a must have!!

I bought this for my 4-year old for Christmas. He has had a blast with it, along with his relatives and friends at Christmas parties etc.

The shape is great for small hands, and the interface is so simple he and his friends mastered it in no time.

However, it is not perfect. The first problem we noticed is that it cuts off the top of what you compose in the viewfinder. So your toddler needs to learn to aim high or use the preview screen. But the preview screen is very poor quality and difficult to use for composition (it's okay for image review).

Next, the flash strength and image exposure seem to be always the same, so if a subject is close enough for their head to fill the frame top to bottom, they'll be very overexposed. But if they're too far away in dim lighting for the flash to fully illuminate them, then they'll be underexposed. The ideal range, judging from several days' worth of photos, seems to be around head and shoulders to head and full torso, for average adults.

But kids that age still enjoy it even when pictures are over and underexposed. If they can recognize the subject, it's fun for them.

That said, pictures taken all the way across a typical dimly-lit living room turn out pretty dark, and will probably just be deleted. Athough it does fine indoors at the right distance range, this camera should be taken outdoors during the day, too, for better results.

Oh -- one tip for indoor shooting: Wait for the flash icon at the lower left of the screen to show the flash is ready. When kids shoot rapidly, some of the shots are taken before the flash is ready, and are all the darker.

Next problem: The screen is square, and does not show the whole picture. The pictures are rectangular (640 x 480, or 1280 x 960), and the screen just cuts off the left and right edges.

Finally, the option to take higher-resolution pictures does NOT improve picture quality, in my tests. I did two tests: one of a refridgerator covered with lots of detailed magnets and things attached with the magnets, and a large photo of a baby's head (taken at an angle to avoid flash glare). In both cases, the 1280 x 960 shot did NOT look any better overall than the 640 x 480 shot. They looked very slightly different, and a few details looked very slightly better while other details looked very slightly worse. But overall it was a wash. I'm sticking with the lower resolution to allow more shots, since it looks as good as the higher resolution.

BTW, I was surprised to find that mine did not include any instructions or software in the package. I learned how to set it to higher resolution from one of the reviews here (hold both arrow buttons down while pressing the shutter, then do the same again to set it back to low resolution).

Regarding overall picture quality, the best pictures are not all that bad for 0.3 megapixel and cheap plastic lens. My 4-year old took one of my wife that I kind of like.

This camera is a fun way for small kids to get started taking real pictures. But older kids will get better results from an adult's camera.

I bought the camera for my grandson who is not quite 2 since he kept trying to use his dad's (my son). He really likes it but he keeps pushing the erase button so he will not have a portfolio anytime soon. The photo quality is bad but I'm sure he doesn't care. The camera is very pricy for the quality but I knew that before I bought it. If he had been at least 5 I would have bought him a real camera. I began taking photos at 5 so I know children that age can be responsible.

Ok, so the picture quality isn't great, but my kids don't notice and are THRILLED with the camera. My son took his camera to his 5th bday party at the bowling alley and all the kids had a blast passing the camera around taking pictures of each other. I would have been freaking if my camera was being passed around, but this camera took the abuse and all the parents loved it. It does need a larger memory card, but almost all "adult" cameras that I've bought needed a larger memory card. The only problem I have is that my daughter wants one of her own.

I bought this toy for my Grandson last Christmas. It worked properly for about a week. (The flash quit going off, then just had other minor problems.) We eventually took it back and got a new one, which worked a little longer (the flash would sometimes work & sometimes not work). After about a month or so the camera quit working altogether. The concept is a good idea & when it worked both my Grandson (now age 5) & Grandaughter (now age 3) loved it, but it just did not last. I buy lots of Fisher Price toys & am very disappointed in the quality of this toy. Also do not bother buying the Fisher Price Kid Tough FP3 Player. It only lasted a little longer than the camera. Both kids got quite frustrated when trying to use these items, only to find they wouldn't work properly. I also want to make it clear neither one of these toys quit due to abuse, they just simply quit working. Both of these items are quite expensive & I expected much better quality, expecially from Fisher Price!

My 3 year old loves this camera. He has dropped it a few times with no ill effects to the camera. The pictures aren't great quality and we did need to add an SD card to allow for more pictures because he tends to just run around snapping pictures and using up all the memory. I think the problem that most people find with the picture quality is that kids tend to move the camera very quickly after taking the picture- making it blurry. But hey, it is just a kids camera after all!
Overall happy with my purchase.

We bought this camera for our two year old daughter, as she had developed an interest in photography. The box and FP web site had lots of promises about it, unfortunately they neglected to mention its shortcomings. Forget the high quality images you see in the advertisements for this product, it is no SLR.

First off the camera shoots at 640x480, with higher resolution by interpolation. What is interpolation, I hear you asking? The camera fakes having a higher resolution by averaging two neighbouring pixels in the image. This leaves you with a larger image, but it contains no additional information, and will actually lose sharpness.

Secondly, the optical viewfinder is not lined up with the image sensor in the camera. This means that if the child relies on the viewfinder to frame the shot, they are going to cut off heads.

Thirdly, the quality of the LCD is extremely poor. Everything is very dark and washed out.

Fourth, and most importantly, image quality. I took 100 pictures with this camera to test it, in a variety of light situations and both with and without flash. The quality of the images it takes are abysmal. Even with perfect lighting and composition, only about 1 in 10 images will come out looking somewhat reasonable. Chromatic aberration of the lens is extreme, with purple fringing around everything bright. Focus is non-existent, and the flash performance is miserable.

If you want a fake camera for your kid to cary around and pretend to take pictures with, I recommend that route over spending the extra money and getting this camera. If you are after pictures that you can print out and stick on the refrigerator or show off to your friends, you won't find them here. You want your child to enjoy the photography experience, not learn the meaning of disappointment when the image they took of the puppy doesn't turn out. Unless you are into life lessons.

Save your money & buy the kid something you won't be returning next week.

This was bought as a gift for our son's 4th birthday. Even though it looks like a toy and the images may not be the best quality, our son loves it because to him, it's a digital camera just like dad's. All he cares about is that it takes real pictures and he can instantly see the pictures he's taken.

As a parent, it's great to look at his pictures. They give us an idea of his world and perspective.