Comments on: What Digital Camera Should I buy my Child?

By: Jay

Jay — Tue, 29 May 2007 14:48:52 +0000

I tend to change digital cameras more than most people, so I usually will give my son (11 years old) the old camera. Recently, I bought a Canon A80 very cheap and used it as the camera I carried everywhere – then I bought the Olympus 770SW for my daily camera. I gave the A80 to my son. First time he used it, it got dropped in 5′ of water. Had I known they were going to a lake, the 770SW would have been the better choice!

By: Peter Emmett

Peter Emmett — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 08:29:11 +0000

I wouldn’t mind if my 7 year old played around with the Nikon D70, but she not allowed anywhere near my Canon 30D :-)

Seriously this is a great article and subsequent comments are great. I’m hoping to convince my wife to let me buy a camera for my daughter, but there is still some convincing to do. cheers/peter

By: Vic

Vic — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 06:13:38 +0000

I have handed down my first digital camera to my grand-daughter (9 year). It’s a Kodak DC3200, 1.3 meg pixel. She has taken resonable snaps and because it’s simple and it’s easy to use. I hope she will graduate to a bigger and better digcam soon. On Oplympus 720SW, there was a good article in Australian Photography, March 2007 on the same subject “Kid’s Digicam” by P A Greco in Q&A.

By: teomat

teomat — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 05:38:01 +0000

Could not spend that much cash on a seven year old. Not a particularly good choice of camera there purely due to the cost. a fuji finepix 1300 1.3megapixel would be more than enough and at has to be one of the cheapest second-hand cameras on the market.

Nearly $300 on a camera for a 7 yr old? Ouch!

By: madelaine

madelaine — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 02:27:57 +0000

My brother is four (almost five) and i’ve been teaching him how to focus manually with my Canon Rebel XT. He’s very interested in learning and improving quickly, as well as taking. Although he is super careful and knows not to touch the glass, i’ve been thinking of getting him his own camera, so i don’t have to share mine (i’m away a lot anyways), but the problem is that i still want to teach him all out the manual parts of cameras, and if i don’t get him an SLR i won’t be able to as much as i’d like. i’m considering, though, to someday upgrade to the Canon 5D and just give him my XT. i’ll just have to wait and see if that’s even possible on my budget.

By: madelaine

madelaine — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 02:22:20 +0000

My brother is four (almost five) and i’ve been teaching him how to focus manually with my Canon Rebel XT. He’s very interested in learning and improving quickly. Although he is super careful and knows not to touch the glass, i’ve been thinking of getting him

By: Ian Worthington

Ian Worthington — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 23:35:42 +0000

Last Christmas we bought my wife’s little sister (13) a camera: the cheapest half-decent one we could find, a bottom of the range Nikon.

It hasn’t left her side since Christmas day and a few weeks later we were forced to go buy a set of nimhs and a charger.

She loves it, it was cheap, and if she trashes it, no big loss (though she doesn’t get told that of course, and she does look after it, wonderful kid that she is.).

Our call therefore would be: first kid’s camera – go cheap and cheerful, expect it to get trashed. Its only got to live a year after which it can be replaced with something good or binned as appropriate.

By: Julie GV

Julie GV — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 19:11:27 +0000

The Olympus Stylus 720 is a nice camera, I have bought the 770 which goes 30 feet (10m) underwater and it fits my most of my needs. The good part about this camera for a child it the freedom to configure the camera. It offers many funcitonality and mode to get your child to familiarize with advanced condepts of photography. (It only misses f-stop and the time the aperture stays open)

It’s a great camera which even you might have fun to play with for its underwater functionality :P

By: Aim

Aim — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 15:17:14 +0000

I bought my 5 yr old the Fisher Price camera for Christmas and she loves it. it is really tough and takes decent pictures. good for learning.

By: Josh Miller

Josh Miller — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 13:46:10 +0000

My parents got all three of my kids digital camera for this last Christmas.

I’m going othave to second the “Don’t go too cheap” mindset of a few other commentors. All three were kind of off brand cameras but they got the oldest one (10) that was “less cheap” since she’s more likely to take care of it. I don’t recall the brand or type but it’s a pretty decent little camera.

The other two on the other hand got these cheap models. The screen is tiny, the battery life sucks (two pics off of my rechargeable AAA batteries) and the quality is pretty bad. Alsot he interface is confusing. The youngest (6) doesn’t seem to care as much about the cheap camera being cheap, she loves it but my son went through a period of frustrated anger over his camera.

His seems to work less effectively than my daughter’s despite being the same camera but at the same time he tends to have less patience and attention for things and I showed him how he needs to hold the camera steady until ti actually finished taking the picture and told him not to use the flash since it tended to white out everything and he’s a little less mad at the camera.

Still, they only hold about 12 pictures and I thing the memory whipes itself out when the batteries are removed.

Anyway, the moral is, don’t go too cheap.

After a bit of research, this is the camera my older daughter got.
http://www.dxgtech.com/product_jpg/DCC561.jpg