A Kid's camera? My daughter's first real digicam

In my first post, I mentioned how we ended up choosing a hot pink Fuji Finepix Z20fd digital camera for my daughter (instead of one of the usual kid's cameras). In this post, I'll explain what led us to this 10MP Digital Camera.

Important features for a kid's camera:

Children have trouble looking through eyeholes and have trouble identifying where to focus a camera. The Fuji Finepix Z20fd has a large, bright screen, so kid's can compose pictures easily.

While an SLR might be ideal for a teen, a small digicam is easier for small hands to hold. You want one that is really light, so your child can hold it in position without her hands getting tired and shaking -- and without her complaining!

Adults may be used to pre-focusing cameras and the composing their pictures, but that is both hard to explain and to accomplish for little hands and for new photographers in general. Ideally, a kid's camera should have both face detection and automatic red-eye reduction, eliminating the need to pre-focus and reducing the most common complaint about small cameras.

A kid's camera (and really any camera) should have a high ISO and shake reduction features, so her pictures come out sharp even when she forgets to steady herself.

As a bonus, the Fuji Finepix Z20fd also takes excellent movies, so she can record herself, her siblings, and her friends doing silly things or when they have performances.

Looking at the picture of the Fuji Finepix Z20fd, you can see that it has a sliding lens cap. My wife and I thought this was really helpful in a kid's camera (really in any digital camera), because it meant both that the lens was protected when not being used and that the camera could be turned on without using any buttons. Since most digital cameras are covered in complicated controls, we thought having this feature would be a real advantage.

Looking at a number of different digicam reviews, it was clear that the Fuji Finepix Z20fd took excellent pictures. This has proven to be true in our experience as well. We sometimes even take our daughter's camera with us and leave all the others at home, because it's not just a kid's camera, it's an excellent digital camera all around!

The camera has one downside as a kid's camera: the lens is so close to the edge of the camera that fingers naturally find their way to blocking it. This is still sometimes a problem even months after she started using the camera. This also a problem when asking someone else to take a picture with the camera.

In the next post, I'll discuss the camera we eventually got for my son when it was his turn to enter the world of photography.

Cameras For Kids

When my oldest daughter received a kid's camera as a birthday present from a relative, my wife and I were almost as excited as she was when she unwrapped it. It wasn't long before her excitement filled the camera's non-expandable memory. I then rushed to transfer the photos, a task also made more difficult by the lack of flash memory, and discovered just how poor the quality was of pictures taken with most cameras for kids.

For her next birthday, we chose a camera for her ourselves. Instead of a kid's camera or toy camera, we bought her a good quality camera that was kid friendly. In my next post, I will explain how we ended choosing her camera, a pink Fuji Finepix Z20fd, 10MP Digital Camera with 3x Optical Zoom. I'll also tell you the mistakes we made and how we could have done even better.





The purpose of this blog is to make suggest some alternatives and also to offer tips on helping kids make the most of their new cameras.