Vtech Kidizoom Pro [camera review]

Editor’s note: Due to technical issues we’ve lost some the images on this article. Our sincerest apologies.

My life revolves around children. Mostly photographing them and, when necessary, I feed mine. So of course I would be the only writer here at DPS to attempt to review the new Vtech KidiZoom Pro. But even the most serious of photographers comes against a pretty big problem when their six year old decides that they want to take pictures too andwhyyyy (that’s the whining) can’t they use your 5D to take pictures of their toys?

Before Christmas I spent absolutely ages online looking for something I thought would be suitable for my six year old boy. Even the ‘shock proof’ ones looked laughable when I imagined them at the mercy of my kids.

The Vtech Kidizoom Pro is a nearly indestructible little whiz of a camera. Features include:

• 1.8 ” screen
• 256mb built-in memory (expandable with SD card)
• 2mpx photos
• 320×240 videos
• MP3 player
• Photo editor to add frames, stamps, distortions, kaleidoscope effects and animations
• Workshop mode to add voice overs to your photos
• 5 games and puzzles
• Double viewfinder for both of their eyes
• Shockproof
• Great grips on the side to make it easy for little hands to handle
• Built-in flash

The camera itself is great. The build and concept are excellent and my son didn’t need my help learning every last detail of the camera’s capabilities before Christmas day was over. I didn’t have to show him anything. He figured it all out which was surprising.

With all of the great features and promise of this camera have also come a level of disappointment with the quality of the images and videos themselves. I was really surprised to find that the photos are worse than most mobile phones can provide these days and I really expected more in terms of image quality. For the price I paid (over £80) I would have expected better images by far. But Elijah doesn’t know about image quality and I’m happy that he has a camera of his own which has really sparked an interest in photography and film making so of course, that puts me over the moon!

When I emptied the camera’s images for the first time, the internal memory seems to have been corrupted by the process and so I ran the recovery function on the camera which didn’t work. The instructions were only 3 steps so it couldn’t have been easier but it just didn’t work. So I had to change the preferences to record to the 2gig SD card I inserted and that’s working fine.

Below are some photos Elijah took all by himself with his Kidizoom Pro

(Editor’s note: Sorry the photos were hosted on the author’s site and we aren’t able to recover them)

And then there was the video that I came across of him weeing into the toilet. Aaah the joys of raising boys.

So in short, I think it’s clear that Vtech decided to put all their money into features like games and graphics at the sacrifice of actually producing a camera which takes decent photographs. It’s a flashy sell and obviously all those features made it this year’s must-have gift because it was very hard to get my hands on one. That said, the quality I have experienced after the purchase definitely doesn’t make me quick to ever buy another Vtech camera in the future. But like I said the bottom line is that he isn’t sneaking my Canon and he is getting a grasp for the concept of photography with a camera he isn’t likely to destroy.