Customer Reviews

Star Theater 2: Home Planetarium

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This planetarium is just a light bulb which reflects a black shadow with barely visible names on your ceiling. It does not glow in the dark and the light is so bright that you can't even use it for a night light. I have nothing positive to say about this, besides the educational CD that comes with it is good.

Prompt service but a disappointment for the 10 yr old grand daughter. Maybe a younger aged child would like.

The item was delivered with a broken base and no sign of any damaged to the box. I was disappointed to see my girls open up, what I was hoping to be, a box with an educational tool but ended up with broken parts in it.

I bought this for my brother for Christmas. He loved it. The entire family listened to the cd and really enjoyed it. The next day it wouldn't turn on.

I would not recommend this toy to anybody. Would rate 1/2 star if that were an option. It is highly disappointing. We returned ours. Even our young child was not impressed. 1. The toy projects light, and the stars are just shadows, not the other way around. I feel this is backwards. 2. The light is not very strong, and the constellations and words are fuzzy & difficult to see, even in a small room. 3. The toy runs on batteries instead of electricity, and eats up batteries extremely fast (ours may have been defective, but it only ran for a few hours on one set of fresh batteries, repeatedly). 4. It was fickle. Sometimes it would turn on, and other times it would not. It would work with one set of batteries, but not another. 5. It's an inconvenient size and odd shape for its purpose.

This is a neat little toy. I would rate it as a high three, low four however.

First, if you are looking for toys that you can play with that encourage more than just pushing a button and encourage learning you may like this toy. However, I would not say this is a toy and it is not something you can turn over to your kids and expect them to get a lot out of it without your input. But it can be interesting to use and fun as a family type toy.

Some of the things you might want to be aware of before purchasing.
This seems very light and has the feel of being quite fragile. We have had ours for some time now and it has not broken though. The "meteor maker" that comes with this is simply a little flashlight with a covering to make different shapes of light on the room where you watch your stars. This is a loose piece and not very big and thus easily lost. It also doesn't do a good job. The 'meteor maker' is not the bonus they advertise it to be on their box. Second, it takes a little bit of effort to set it to the exact day and time for your area. Not impossible but not something a child will do on their own. Also, this does not seem to project well on very large rooms. We had no problem in the bathroom projecting the stars on the ceiling. The names of the stars do not project and if they do they are not legible. We were able to do it in my son's room but it was a little bit more blurry.

Although this can be educational, I think it is more interesting than really educational. We would have a hard time looking at this in our bathroom and then going out to the night sky and finding some constellation we were able to find in the night sky. If you want to use this to find some of the constellations and tell the stories about them to your kids, this might be a good place to begin.

Overall:
If you are going to do something interesting with your kid and you have the time to set it up so you can see the night sky the way it's going to look tonight; this is a fascinating little toy. But remember, it really isn't a toy and it really isn't going to be fun for your kid if you just hand it to him and expect him (or her) to be able to set it up to look like it would tonight and operate it with no input from you. If you look at it more like you are using this to spark an interest, encourage an interest, explore something new- then this is a great piece of equipment.

This was a christmas gift for our eight year old son, it is educational as well as fun. Lots of fun at bedtime.

I got this at a thrift store for only $4.00, and it was worth it - it is interesting and a lot of fun. I'm glad I didn't pay full price for it, though, because it is pretty flimsey and goes through exactly 3 batteries every 24 hours.

It was a gift for my 5 year old granddaughter, and she loves it, but we cannot afford to keep batteries in it. Also, for it to work well you need to be in an extremely small room. We use it in our half bath because the "stars" don't project well in a normal room.

Not sorry I bought it, but it isn't all that great. For $4.00 it was worth buying and fooling around with it for a day, but there isn't much to it and by the time you pay to change batteries over and over again, you lose much of the value of it.