Review: LeapFrog Click n’ Create Digital Camera
Written on Dec 22, 2009 by Brian and filed under LeapFrog, Sakar
Sakar has brought to market the LeapFrog digital camera that we first saw at CES earlier this year. The Click n’ Create features a 2.1 megapixel sensor, 1.5″ display and runs on three AAA batteries.
The design of the camera is true to LeapFrog’s standards, it looks almost exactly like their Leapster2 portable gaming machine. The exterior is textured a bit, so it feels good in the in hand, and is grippy too, so it’s less likely to slip out of a child’s grasp. To get started parents will need to add the batteries, but after that, kids are good on their own.
The camera features four buttons, all of which our test kids figured out either on their own, or with a little coaching. But largely kids were able to operate the camera independently, which is nice.
When taking shots kids can either use the display, or the viewfinder. The camera is fixed focus, the manual recommends trying to take pictures at a distance of 5 feet. Of course this is virtually impossible to manage with kids. The screen displays the number of shots remaining and the battery status, so kids get an honest replica of what an adult camera feels like, which is a nice touch. There’s also a flash, with indicator, that can be turned to auto or off. This sounds like a small thing, but the last several cameras we’ve seen have offered no such controls.
Another great thing which can be turned off are most of the sound effects. While it’s fun that the camera encourages kids with statements like “Great Shot,” when your child runs around the house and rattles off 100 in a row, it gets a little old. We did notice though that the muting isn’t remembered after you turn the camera off and back on.
The other adjustment is resolution. There are three settings that let you control shot resolution. The highest setting is 1600×1280, though it goes down to 640×480 if you’re more concerned about the number of pictures the camera can hold. The camera saves it’s photos to 8MB of internal memory. There is a serious issue here though, the memory is RAM, which means that when the camera loses power, the photos are gone. So parents need to copy the pictures to a computer before changing batteries and before the batteries die. I’m not entirely sure why Sakar went this route, but it’s not kid friendly.
Aside form taking photos, kids can view their photos in slideshow mode on the camera’s screen. It’s also possible to delete photos in this mode to get rid of shots that kids don’t want.
Once the photos get transferred to the computer, kids can go to work with editing software that lets them do the basics like crop and resize. There’s also a bunch of overlays they can add and games to play. The software is pretty well done and could probably stand on its own as a first photo editor for kids. It’s definitely a highlight of this package.
In the end though, it’s all about photo quality. While most kid’s camera companies don’t want to hear this, our test kids always want to see their photos afterward. 9 times out of 10 they’re disappointed because kid’s cameras do such a bad job of taking even decent pictures.
In this case, there are two issues. First, there’s substantial shutter lag, so from the button press to the photo taking, there’s a delay, meaning you’ll get a lot of blurry pictures as kids move around in the time it takes for the photo to take. Here’s an example of what happens:
Of our test shots, 60-70% had the blur effect. In this shot it looks like the dog has a halo around her body. It’s not horrible here, but know that it happens more than half the time. The second common issue is poor low-light operations, as can be seen here:
You can see from the dog’s eyes that the flash was used, but the flash doesn’t have enough power to illuminate the target area, yielding a bad picture. This is a typical low-light shot.
That’s not to say it’s all bad. Outside with reasonable light, the camera is capable of decent shots. Not that you’d expect print-worthiness out of a 2.1 megapixel sensor, but kids can get pictures they’re proud of.
Bottom Line
With an MSRP of $49.99, we’re again stuck in a spot where we think a used digital camera comes out ahead of the kid’s version. This one may be more durable, but if you have kids that want decent photos, we haven’t seen a camera for kids yet that lives up to that expectation. In fact, one of our testers, a six year-old boy, took five shots then gave me the camera back saying, “I don’t want to use this camera – it takes blurry fuzzballs.”
The camera looks good, is easy to use and comes with a nice desktop software package, but falls short in photo quality. If you’re looking for something simple to get kids used to digital photography, this is probably a fine solution.
Rating – 2.5 out of 5 Stars
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