At the discounted price this is a solid first camera for kids. It has good features that can help kids develop solid photography skills, while not being too difficult to use. However, I would emphasize that it will take some effort to get good pictures out of this camera. I'm attaching an example of an image taken at the high-quality setting, which produces a 12MP image of about 3mb size on disk (including histograms and image info for reference. It does best in bright light without too much zoom and a steady hand.
I'll highlight some specific features below:
- Image Capture: Solid 12MP at approx 3mb on disk. It can produce usable images of good quality. The capture is kind of slow, so you need to emphasize the need to hold the camera steady for about 1 second during each picture. The capture is highly subject to motion blur, especially in low light conditions. They seem to let the shutter speed drop quite low, so in low light you really need to have a very steady hand or position the camera on a tripod or table top.
- Zoom: the 18X zoom seems to start at a wide angle and goes to a fairly strong telephoto, but since digital zoom is basically cropping the image, I wouldn't zoom in too far. Zooming will, of course, make the motion blur even worse.
- Video: Captures good quality video, although I would advise using 1024 to save space since I didn't notice that the 4K video looked any better than 1024. Video is also subject to motion blur at low light. The front display is a great feature that makes it much easier to record selfie videos for vlogging etc.
- User Interface: It uses a button menu approach that takes some getting used to, but kids seem to be able to navigate this OK.
- Battery: Good. Battery life seemed reasonable. We found the charging port is only compatible with older USB-A (square plug) to USB-C cables. It won't work if you plug in one of the modern USB-C/USB-C 'smart' cables, so this can be a bit of a headache.
- Time %26 Date Setting: Base on my experience, the camera doesn't seem to hold the time %26 date setting between battery changes. I'm calling this one out as an inconvenience, since it means you need to manually set time and date after each battery change or else set the date and time of each image file manually. It's not a show stopper, but can cause issues if you forget to do this and then try to merge images in to existing photo libraries, since they all have 2025 timestamps (manufacturing date?)
Overall Recommendation: This is a good, basic first camera for kids. It can be a good camera to teach basic principles of photography, such as composition, lighting, capture process. In the right hands it can produce good quality images. However, it can be challenging to use, especially in low light. I would advise adults who are looking for an inexpensive camera to consider older models from major brands, perhaps with smaller image size. However, this would be a good choice for a kids first camera.