Sunday, September 14, 2008

Crayola Child Digital Camera Review (or Lack Thereof)

My original intent was to make this a video review of the Crayola child digital camera but the technical problems to follow prevented that. It started right away with the battery cover which took me nearly 20 minutes to unscrew the cover (I had to use a tiny screwdriver and I almost striped the screws in the process), put in the batteries and get the battery cover back on the Crayola kid’s digital camera.


After that frustrating ordeal, I handed the camera to my 2 year old niece and let her run around with it. Now I know the Crayola camera is for kids 3 and up but my niece was over and since she sees me using a camera all the time I thought she might understand the concept. At first she was having a lot of fun running around and making everyone say cheese and even held the child’s digital camera in the general direction of the person or animal she was trying to photograph. All photo taking stopped however when she discovered the power button had a funny little noise. Next thing I know she was intrigued by the noise the delete button made and all her photos were gone! Got her to take a couple more photos for my review of the child digital camera and then quickly retrieved the camera before she erased those too!

I have software that records your desktop and wanted to record the install process for the Crayola digital camera review but after having problems, I thought maybe it was from running the two programs at the same time, so I stopped the recording. I finished the install wizard on the CD and restarted my computer as prompt but when the computer restarted there was no icon and I could not find the program listed anywhere. I went through the install process once again with the same result. I decided to try just hooking up the Crayola child digital camera to my PC and hope it would recognize that it was a camera and at least I could get the photos off the camera to show the quality of the pictures. I hooked the USB cord up and the kid camera’s LCD screen started to glow and my computer chimed like it was recognized but did not react or list a device in my computer panel. I tried to turn the child digital camera off but it did not respond. I unplugged the Crayola camera from the PC and the camera’s LCD screen continued to glow and would not shut off. Frustrated, I left it glowing on my desk overnight only to find it with dead batteries in the morning. Long story short, I repeated the entire process with the same results, from changing the batteries to the camera lying on my desk over night, unable to turn itself off, finding it with dead batteries again in the morning.

I thought of trying to install the Crayola camera software on my laptop, contacting the company Sakar that makes the kids camera or trying something else in hopes of making it work but since all the parents reviews of this camera all have similar issues, I decided to just agree with the consensus that this Crayola child digital camera sucks.