Longtime readers of Z Recommends know our philosophy on digital cameras for preschoolers: Simplicity, ease-of-use, and durability trump image quality for the first several years of life. There's an inverse relationship between these priorities and a child's age and maturity level, though, so after a couple of years playing with her Fisher-Price Kid-Tough Digital Camera and another year or so with it basically being out of service (it seemed to start draining batteries and functioning intermittently, and the plastic housing started to sweat after being left in a window ledge for a while - not good!) we have taken a step closer to a "real" camera in our main gift for Z's fifth birthday, and bought her a Polaroid a530, a low-end, lightweight, and easy to use digital camera.

By "a step" I mean that it still doesn't offer image quality matching that of a digital SLR, but we still can't trust her with that. If you're willing to drop $300-$400, the Olympus Stylus Tough series seems pretty kid-friendly, but for us it made more sense to go with a $50-$100 camera that was lightweight and easy to handle, so that if she did break it, we wouldn't be out quite as much money. The details below are provided not just to recommend the a530 specifically, which seems to be working out well so far, but to share the general considerations we'd advise for any camera you pick up for a five-year-old user.

Z: "I'm going to take a picture of your butt. And put it on the Internet." Welcome to the world of a five-year-old.

What we liked about this camera

Here's why we chose this particular camera:

• 5.0 megapixel image resolution. Five years old, 5 megapixels. It's a coincidence, but that seemed like plenty for her age.


• 2.5" TFT screen. We got our first taste of a TFT (thin-film transistor) screen when we published a comparative review of kids' digital cameras in late 2007. The screen is easy to see in bright sunlight as well as indoors. The size is also nice and big so she can see what she's shooting.


• Simple controls. There are features buried in menus she won't use for a while, but the basics are very easy for her to control herself. More on that in the next bullet list.


• No zooming lens. We wanted a camera with a flush front and no protruding lens so that it would be more likely to survive a fall and the lens would be better protected from whatever other abuse Z inadvertently dishes out. Five-year-old + projecting lens shaft = bad news sooner or later.


• AA batteries: No more of those weird watch batteries like the Kid-Tough has - just a pair of AAs. This camera seems to burn through them pretty quickly (Z has taken maybe 100 photos, which equates to about 5 uploads since we haven't bought an SD card for it yet) and it needs new batteries, but we will primarily use rechargeables so we can live with that.


• $60. Sixty dollars! That's a good deal.

Simple camera = fun kids' camera

This is how simple the easily accessible features are. Z has already figured out most of them in about two days.

• On/off: Small round button on top of the camera she can easily identify and press.


• Shoot: Small rectangular button on top of the camera, also easily identified and pressed.


• Zoom (or lack thereof): A sliding switch on the side of the camera toggles between portrait (i.e. tulip) and landscape (e.g. mountain peaks) mode. There is no zoom, which means (a) fewer decisions to make - just get closer if you want to be closer! - and (b) no projecting lens, as mentioned above.


• Flash: One of four options on a four-way button, with a handy lightning bolt flash icon on it. Can be enabled only in landscape mode, but Z has already figured out how to use it and is working on the when to/when not to part.


• Playback: A button on the back of the camera, then you flip through them with the left and right toggle of the four-way switch. She hasn't mastered that yet, but it won't be long.

So easy! Again, there are more controls behind digital menus, but not only does Z not need those now, they are not so near the surface that she accidentally navigates into them and then gets lost/can't take pictures.

Simple camera hacks for preschoolers

We also did a couple of things to personalize/modify the camera to make it better suited to her needs. These are very simple steps you can take to help your kid get comfortable with and get the most out of their Polaroid a530, or any other low-end digital camera for that matter.

1. I made a custom carry strap out of ribbon, and we taught her right away that holding the camera means holding it with the carry strap around her wrist. Since it's a pretty pink ribbon, this is easier for her to remember.


2. We put two layers of the foggy standard Scotch tape over the flash to act as a diffuser (spread out the light and make it less harsh). Since she likes to take close-up photographs of toys and other objects, we may even experiment with adding a couple more layers of tape or colored tape she can use as light filters to create weird effects. More on that in another post!


3. We will probably buy a soft camera case for this, but could easily have made a carrying case. If we had more time, that would be fun. We have no time.

Z's first slideshow

We did post photos from Z's Kid-Tough camera back when she first got it, but haven't since. We also did a really great interview with a photographer who helped her child learn to take photos from toddlerhood on.

Here's a slideshow of the best of her photographs from the several dozen she's shot in the past two days with her new Polaroid. One of the photos of her little friends in her new dollhouse has a weird tinge around the edge - that's because she was trying to put her finger over the flash to help diffuse it more. It reminds us of some 1970s-era photography and gave us the idea of creating colored flash diffusers for her to experiment with.

Don't judge this camera's technical chops by these photographs, as we're still figuring out how to use it. But Z is having a blast documenting her world... including a lot of spots we are going to go ahead and pick up/clean now that she's immortalizing them.



All of this is stuff Z sought out to take photographs of herself. Suggesting things to take pictures of is generally a bad idea, because your child will surprise you with what they capture on "film" if you give them a chance!

You can pre-order (?!) the Polaroid a530 on Amazon.com for $60, or if you are less patient you can disregard their weird statement about it not being released yet and get it at a brick-and-mortar store - we bought ours at Target.

We've blogged about sales on the dead-simple, highly functional, curse-free line of Flip digital camcorders before, but we've never seen anything like this. The 30-minute Flip Ultra, which we use to shoot our video at ZRecs, is selling at the moment - and I'd stress the word moment - for an obscene $50, down from their pretty firm selling price of around $100 and their MSRP of ~$150.

Now, we know that they're clearing these out because more people want a 60-minute Flip than a 30-minute one (those ones are on sale for around $100), and the Mino is super-slim and thus takes up even less room in that pocket (those are on sale too, but not as much), and there's an HD edition out now, which uses a rechargeable lithium battery instead of AAs... don't blame these guys for being innovators.

But if you are in need of a cheap video camera to take on the go, do I even have to say it? This deal rocks. It was kind of hard to steady our hands as we pushed the "Add to Cart" button, but we did - and bought five Flips for some pretty rockin' upcoming ZRecs projects, and one for Z. (This is even cheaper than some really lousy digicams made specifically for kids.) If you wish to do such a thing, you'd better get your spouse involved, because there is a per-customer limit of three. At $50, I almost feel silly saying "we recommend this camera" - the price makes it kind of a no-brainer, from our perspective, unless you really have no need for a device like this.

The one concern we ever had about this camera, the quality of the included software for processing your videos (one of the innovations of the Flip is that it contains its own video editing software, so it works on any computer and doesn't require a desktop app), has been vastly improved - it now works very well and we sort, edit, and process videos like gangbusters. If you're looking for more input, check out the user reviews at the links above or read our review of the Flip Ultra in the ZRecs Archives, where we got a lot of techy reader comments, largely positive and now at least partially outdated.

So! Expect more video footage from Z herself soon, and some interesting news on how we plan to use our five new ZRecs Flip Ultras.

We reviewed our Sony Cybershot DSC-W50 back in December of 2006. It lived a short but wonderful life, dying in the crystal clear waters of the Bahamas after falling out of Jeremiah's pocket in December of 2007. After a lot of thought and research (it's always a lot of research for us), we decided to upgrade to a digital SLR. But after a couple of months of having our Digital SLR, we were missing the simplicity and pocket-ability of a point and shoot. Luckily for us, we were offered the chance to revisit the Cybershot with the Sony Cybershot DSC-W120.

Here are the main things we love about this upgraded version of the DSC-W50:

• The Carl Zeiss lens. What can I say? I'm a sucker for a good lens, which can make a huge difference in picture quality. Few digital point-and-shoot cameras (well, few point-and-shoot cameras, period) have lenses this good.


• 4x optical zoom. Optical zoom is the zooming in and out that the lens itself is technically capable of. This is in contrast to digital zoom, which is something the camera's brain tries to do, essentially blowing up information in the picture, and not nearly as well. Look for a camera with a high "x" of optical zoom.


• 7.2 megapixels. We are never going to print mural-sized photographs of our daughter or of the products we review, but 7.2 megapixels means we have plenty of digital information to allow us to crop photos up close as needed in iPhoto (or whatever image-editing software you use).


• A short lag time. This is crucial for parents of fast-moving kids.

The new Cybershot has a 2.5" TFT LCD screen on the back so you don't have to squint to see your pictures, even in bright sunlight. It also fits easily in your purse so you always have a camera handy for impromptu memory-making at the park. It has some other crazy features that work as advertised, including a face recognition option that can set the flash, focus, exposure, and white balance to bring faces out of shadows and reduce the reflective glare that a flash can cause.

The coolest new feature offered over the older DSC-W50 (other than the fact that it comes in pink) is what Sony calls "Smile Shutter Technology." If you set the camera in this mode, you don't need to engage the shutter to try to capture a picture of someone smiling. The camera does the work for you, and when we played with this feature, it worked as expected; a nice broad smile is far better at triggering the camera to take a photo than a sensitive or Mona Lisa-esque twitch.

This technology does beg a few questions about the purpose of taking pictures, and the kinds of memories we're trying to make. I'm a firm believer in the idea that some of the most telling, memorable, and yes, happy moments we can capture sometimes have nothing to do with a smile, which can be a trained response to the presence of a camera that actually masks the nuance of what is actually going on.

But if you recognize that this is just another tool in your arsenal of "automated" picture-making opportunities - akin to autofocus, automatic exposure settings, and other aids - Smile Shutter offers benefits for everyone, if you can find the right circumstance. We're looking forward to letting this camera do some of our work for us this holiday season - while the camera responds quickly enough for you to easily capture a smile yourself, the new setting means that instead of watching the action through the camera lens, you can set up this camera on a tripod, aimed at your festivities, and it'll capture the smiles for you - leaving you to enjoy the firsthand experience. Amazingly, the camera can even distinguish between adults and children and you can give the kids' smiles trigger priority.

At the moment, you can pick up a Cybershot DSC-W120 for about $150 on Amazon.com. For one of the highest-rated digital point-and-shoot cameras online (at the moment, it has an average user rating of 4.5 out of 5 stars), we think that's a bargain.