Entered CNET Catalog: 01/25/2007
SKU: J8209
Manufacturer: Fisher-Price
Product summary
The good: Really simple; very durable
The bad: Only VGA resolution; unexpectedly heavy
The bottom line: Not a great camera, but it's an excellent child's toy.
Editors' review
- Editors' Choice: No
- Reviewed on: 01/25/2007
It's never too early to get your kids into photography, and Fisher-Price realizes that fact. The Fisher-Price Kid Tough Digital Camera is an extremely durable, superbly simple, toy VGA camera that can get even the smallest carpet shark taking snapshots.
It's important to note that this toy camera is far more a toy than a camera. Its large, colorful body and rubber grips make it look like a cross between a portable game system and a pillow. Shots can be framed with either the camera's tiny, 1-inch LCD, or with the twin viewfinders, which can be looked through like a pair of binoculars. It takes four AA batteries, which find their home behind a screwed-in plate at the bottom of the camera. The plate also hides the SD card slot, a surprising and pleasant feature on such a simple toy. The screws keeping the plate secure make changing batteries a pain, but at least they keep kids from popping open their camera and discovering a small, easily swallowed memory card. However, the camera is unexpectedly heavy, weighing almost 14 ounces with batteries and card.
With its meager VGA resolution and only five buttons, the Kid Tough Digital Camera was clearly designed just for little kids. Large, colorful buttons turn the camera on and off, delete photos, review old photos, and take pictures. Kids should be warned to stay away from the big red delete button, or at least warned of its significance, but otherwise they'll be running around taking photos in no time.
Bright colors go hand in hand with loud sounds, and the Kid Tough Digital Camera has plenty of both. Cartoonish sound effects accompany every action, from flipping through pictures to shooting photos to turning the camera on and off. Unfortunately, the sounds can't be turned off, so parents who buy it should be prepared for the noise.
Kids play rough, and the Kid Tough Digital Camera is built to withstand a beating. We don't have any children working in the office, so I gave the camera my own special brand of scientific abuse. After several drops, tosses, and flings, the camera still worked just fine. One crash dislodged the memory card, but a quick reseating resolved the issue.
Unfortunately, its camera aspects aren't so great. It's very slow to shoot, lagging up to a second before a shot and up to three seconds between shots. Since it's only a VGA camera, printouts of any decent size are going to turn out poorly. Still, parents don't put their kids' crayon drawings on the fridge because they look amazing; they put them on the fridge because their kids made them. They won't be publishable works of art, but the tiny images can easily be printed out and stuck on the fridge.
The Fisher-Price Kid Tough Digital Camera isn't a very good camera, but it's an excellent toy that can help get your young child into photography. It's easy to use and nearly indestructible, so you can feel confident that your kid won't break it. It might not seem like much, but it's a good start. A colorful, rubberized VGA camera in their hands today could become a Canon EOS 1Ds Mark II in their hands tomorrow.
User opinions
Select a User Opinion to view: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14out of 14 user reviews
too expensive @ 39.99
Pros: colorful toy
Cons: too heavy, to cumbersome and for the money you could buy a nice digital any 4 or 5 yr old can use
out of 14 user reviews
GREAT for kids, takes awsome pictures, waterproff
Pros: easy to use, nice pictures for a kids camera, waterproof, we use it in the swimming pool....... takes GREAT underwater pictures, alot of fun.
Cons: a little heavy
out of 14 user reviews
SAVE YOUR MONEY BUY SOMETHING ELSE
Pros: The color blue
Cons: The shutter button is too hard to press.
The Flash is too bright for the resolution.
The picture quality is horrible.
It is infected with computer viruses.
Extremely overpriced for the product provided.
We bought this camera for our son to play with, and we were not expecting something grandiose. However, we were extremely disappointed with the horrible quality of the pictures provided by this camera. The first thing we noticed was that the shutter button is too small for any child to use comfortably and hard to press making it impossible for our child to take pictures easily. The cost of this camera is way overpriced for the quality of the pictures and the hassle it imposed on us after the viruses it contained infected our computer. We are taking it back and I will not be satisfied until I get my money back. Save your time and money and purchase something else.
out of 14 user reviews
Poor Product - Came with a virus
Pros: Durable. Nothing else.
Cons: Terrible picture quality and size, heavy and cumbersome, small shutter release button is hard for little fingers to push, and it came with a virus on it.
out of 14 user reviews
worse thing i ever bought for my kids.
Pros: it has none. Ignore the 'great toy" stuff it isn't, it's junk . I read the mixed reviews took a chance and wasted my money
Cons: lousy picture, hard to use, heavy . I love fisher price stuff so i figured it can't be 'that' bad, so gave them the benefit of doubt and wasted my money neither one of my boys ever used it and they love gadgets.
out of 14 user reviews
AWEFUL PICTURE QUALITY - DESTROYS BATTERIES IN MINUTES
Pros: CAN BE DROPPED; EASY TO USE
Cons: JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING ELSE ABOUT IT
If you don't mind horrible picture quality and charging batteries for 8 hours just to use it for 5 minutes, then you'll like this camera. Otherwise, you'd be better off spending an extra $25 to get a 'Real' digital camera and by a nice case for it in case it's dropped.
out of 14 user reviews
Picture quality so poor, screen/computer pic is white
Pros: kid tough?
Cons: Ok, pic is so bad even with bi-focals I can't see them. Tried downloading them to compute even worse yet. Cost me $60 at Meijers, read reviews on Amazon where people raved how wonderful this camera was. This thing SUCKS!!!!
out of 14 user reviews
Okay for a 3 Y.O.
Pros: Feels sturdy. Easy to use.
Cons: horrible pic quality, Pretty expensive for the pic quality.
The user interface is simple enough that a 5 year old can probably figure it out. It feels very sturdy with the rubber grips and surprisingly heavy body. It has built in flash which is a necessity to take any usable pictures.
So for the bad things. The LCD screen is dark and fuzzy. The camera we bought already had the fisher-price logo burned into it (unfortunately we don't have the receipt anymore so can't return it). The kids played with it for about an hour when the camera locked up. It display garbage on the screen and the number 50. No idea what this means. We took out the batteries to reboot the camera. I think it has something to do with the sd card we used as it only happens when the card is in. Though it says Vista compatible on the box, I was unable to get it to be recognized. I plugged the camera into another PC running XP and it was recognized instantly.
The picture quality is the camera's biggest flaw. For being a 70 dollar camera, you would figure it can take pictures as well as a camera phone considering that is all it does. You would be quite disappointed. The camera takes very dark pictures, especially indoors. I thought the low quality may just be lack of light but outside pictures did not improve. The camera looks like it runs a really high ISO rating to compensate for the low light. This causes the CCD pixels to randomly show blue and red dots in dark areas.
In hindsight, I think I would have rather gone with a regular but very inexpensive camera. My kids are not too rough with toys. They have dropped my now 5 year old canon many times and it is still going strong. Just my 2 cents.
out of 14 user reviews
Cameras don't work out of the packaging!!!
Pros: Looked like a nice product originally
Cons: Two (2) different cameras didn't work out of the box
Tried several new packages and brands of batteries to no avail. One unit actually shows a "blue screen" on the LCD but the buttons don't appear to work (won't shut off, take a picture or otherwise respond to user input) BEWARE....BEWARE....BEWARE......Quality of the product speaks for itself....For the price, buy a "real" digital camera where quality is a concern to the manufacturer and a couple of non-working toys for the kids to actually enjoy... Big dissappointment!!! out of 14 user reviews
Had similar problem as the user with the five year old little girl.
Pros: great for little ones-easy fun.
Cons: batteries burn out fast
out of 14 user reviews
The Fisher-Price Kid Tough Digital Camera is not kid-tough afterall
Pros: The design is child-friendly.
Cons: Picture quality is not so good and my 5 year old's camera stopped working after 1 month.
out of 14 user reviews
expensive horrible flash durable
Pros: durable, kid friendly, easy to use
Cons: HORRIBLE Flash, hard to change batteries, picture quality
out of 14 user reviews
Great camera for younger children
Pros: tough, very easy to use, fun factor is there
Cons: picture quality is only VGA
So far the camera has survived several drops without missing a beat. What a great product!
out of 14 user reviews
An excellent toy
Pros: Durable; easy to use; price
Cons: Poor choice for battery, poor location of battery and memory card
When we took it out of the box, it wasn't very easy to get the batteries in it. The phillips screws were very very tiny. I had to use an eyeglasses screwdriver to get them out. The fact that it uses a watch-type battery as well as double As was disappointing. Fisher Price could pony up a rechargeable lithium battery for very little cost.
We misplaced the 32MB card initially, but my daughter was able to take over 90 photos on the camera's internal memory. They were grainy photos, about as good as any VGA camera phone. My daughter was able to take the pictures without me showing her what to do, and hitting the arrow buttons displays the photos she took on the back viewscreen.
The only other minor problem was they made the noisiest button be the delete button. It chimes when she hits it. This is too attractive for a two year old. She ends up deleting half the pictures she takes just for the fun of hearing that noise.
The best feature of this toy: durable as a tonka truck. My daughter has walked on it and even jumped on it. There isn't a scuff mark on it and it still takes pictures just fine; I would hate to see what would happen to the Evolt with her doing that.
The viewmaster double-sighting is great for kids. The only thing that they could ahve changed is the placement of the snapshot button. Having it at the very top of the hand hold is tough for a two year old to reach while trying to hold the camera level enough to take a good picture. About 2 out of 3 times, my daughter gets shots of of feet or cuts off her subjects' heads.
All in all, it's a good first toy for a budding shutter bug.
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