Looking for a great device for young kids to listen to music or audio stories they can control themselves? The Sansa Shaker, which earned ZRecs' Top Pick status for its innovative features and ease of use, is currently on sale for $20 for their red 1GB model. [Thanks, Adrienne!] These list for $50 and typically retail for $40 online - in fact, you'd have to pay $40 to get the same Shaker in pink, and would have to drop down to a 512MB model to get a blue one for $20.

The Sansa Shaker is a portable MP3 player that features dual headphone jacks, a small speaker that's perfect for little listeners who shouldn't be using headphones at all, and you advance tracks by shaking it. It's a fantastic device for kids ages two and up, and should be fun for older kids, too, who will enjoy being able to listen to music with friends using the two headphone jacks. You can read our review here for more info if you'd like a more detailed critique, but order through this post, not the review, to get the $20 IGB deal. The player gets good reviews and we love ours; snatch one before they're gone if the Shaker would be a good fit for your family.

We've had several reader inquiries for us to repost or revise last year's ZRecs Digital Camera Showdown, and we're seeing a lot of search traffic showing up there, so I thought it might be helpful to step in with a few observations if you're thinking about getting one for your child.

I have to admit right off that we haven't tested the many new, lousy-looking kids' digital cameras that have come out in the past year. None of them offer specs that seem better than the ones we weeded through in last year's ZRecs Digital Camera Showdown, and the prices aren't coming down yet - they are all still $50-$60 unless you are looking at something that definitely won't be around next year. So let's check in with last year's contenders:

Fisher-Price Kid Tough Digital Camera: None of the internal specs have changed, and we were quite happy with them - in our juried photo comparison, the Kid-Tough came out on top - but the housing has been redesigned to make the camera waterproof. Sounds good to us. We rated this camera a very good option, gave it our "Top Pick" status, and praised its ease of use and image quality. Every once in a while we get an angry email or comment from a parent who expects a kids' digital camera to take photos as good as their own digital camera does, and to them I say phooey. This is a toy camera. It's as good as you're going to get, at least for now; creating a padded container of your own for a used digital camera, or just holding off for a few years until your child stops being so fumbly, is always an option. But if you want a kids' digital camera, we think this is the way to go. In short:

We remain satisfied with the experience, durability, and overall quality Fisher-Price's digital camera offers for young children. The prints we made of several photos taken by all cameras consistently had Fisher-Price entries placing in the top two, sometimes turning in the best-quality shot in the group. The camera's durable design and image quality make it our top pick for children ages 2-5.

VTech Kidizoom: We stand by our original assessment: The photos suck, the file size is absurd, and the extra features are a waste of your child's precious hours of childhood. The "sale" price of fifty-some dollars seems to be the going rate now, instead of the list price of $70, but still, the F-P model just takes waaaay better pictures. Here's what we said about the Kidizoom last year:

The Kidizoom is a missed opportunity, and we'd recommend skipping its first model year in favor of the Fisher-Price option, which offers similar durable styling and far better image quality. If VTech elected to bump up its abysmal capture size to complement this camera's kid-friendly features, they may have a real competitor on their hands. For this holiday season, however, the Kidizoom's image quality, which approximates that of a good cell phone camera, is a big disappointment for parents interested in printed photos or for children old enough to appreciate focus, color, and clarity in their photos. It also takes terrible video.

Nothing has been changed in this camera's guts or exterior - it's the same camera. You've been warned!

Polaroid Pixie: We gave the Pixie a thumbs-up with the caveat that children old enough to use it might do just as well with a used "adult" digital camera. We also had some problems with the camera in our testing, but worked out that it was just the slow cycling of the flash when it was in use:

Our one concern about the Polaroid Pixie is its flash recycle time, which can run from 5-10 seconds between shots. The flash can be shut off, which means users should not experience this lag time when shooting outdoors, but for indoor shots this delay can be frustrating for children and even for adults, and could have been mitigated somewhat by the inclusion of an icon or sound to indicate when the camera was ready to take another picture.

After our review ran, however, we started hearing reports that some consumers purchased cameras that quickly died on them, which, in case you're taking notes, tends to enrage them. We used ours for a few weeks without incident before passing it on, but spotty performance will kill a product like this out of the gate, and that is what appears to have happened to the spritely little Pixie. It quickly garnered a bushelful of one-star reviews on Amazon.com and Target's website; it's now available on Amazon only through resellers (even at $40 they'll have a hard time selling a camera with a one-star customer rating) and although Target's site claims it is available "in stores only," we haven't seen one in ours, and we suspect they have gone the way of the dodo.

Which is ironic, because the Pixie's companion product, a digital video camera, is a great find. We highly recommend it. Especially because, holy cow, you can get the pink one now for $40 on Amazon.com. Do I need to tell you how great this deal is? (Guess they should have stuck with the blue/orange, which is palatable for both genders and will still run you $65.)

We can't really close this round of recommendations any better than we did last year:

Z's favorite camera to play with was the Kidizoom, which is why we described that camera as a profound missed opportunity. The user interface and special features are excellent, and she was thrilled by the options of adding borders and silly hats to her subjects. But having seen the way consumers have been divided over the image quality of last year's Fisher-Price camera, which we believe produces passable photos for a toddler camera, we would issue a warning: If Kid-Tough photos did not meet your standard, the low-water mark has been reset by VTech. A couple of examples are below; keep in mind that the rendering of JPEGs for this post actually mutes the differences somewhat, which are even more pronounced in the prints we had made.

Still not convinced? Below are a couple of shots taken with the Kidizoom. These are not selected for their poor quality, but are representative samples of the hundreds of photographs we took with this camera. The first was taken outdoors in full light under a gently overcast sky - ideal conditions for picture-taking. The second was taken indoors under bright interior lights, and an in-camera enhancement was then added.

You don't have to look far to see why this is the case. Below is a listing of the folder of images we had printed. Notice how the file sizes drop off after the images taken by our "adult" camera (labeled "sony").

File size is not a conclusive determinant of image quality; the eye is. But given our experience of the digital files we viewed on our computer monitor and our blind assessments of the digital prints made from some of those files, the breakdown is no surprise to us. The Kidizoom's competitor for toddler cameras, the Fisher-Price Kid-Tough model, takes far better pictures, while the Kidizoom's are so bad we consider the camera defective by design.

In contrast to 2007, when many companies were playing catchup to 2006's breakout Fisher-Price camera, 2008 was a fallow year for kids' camera technology, with no new advances to speak of, and no improvements made to existing models. It thus goes without saying that none of the feature requests we posed to companies last year have been realized - a custom style of flash for toddler use (since they tend to take pictures from a shorter distance), elimination of the in-camera delete option (toddlers cannot make such choices responsibly), and a camera memory that retains pictures even when the batteries run out, instead of losing them. But while companies may fail us, readers rarely do, and someone (can't remember who now) offered a useful hack for the first request: Put a piece of that foggy-looking Scotch tape ("Magic Tape") over the flash, and you've instantly diffused it.

So there's our recommendation for you: A Fisher-Price Kid-Tough Digital Camera and a roll of Scotch Tape.