MyFirst Camera 3 – 16MP kid safe camera review
The MyFirst Camera 3 was an unexpected arrival that came with a replacement of the MyFirst Camera Wi we pre/reviewed a while back. It’s a hard to break camera designed for kids and it’s really easy to use.
Reposted from my other blog
Your kid is going to love it, but I’m going to nitpick here because that’s what I do.
The unit creates 16MP pictures, but the results are not processed particularly well and any cell phone from the last 5 years or so is going to absolutely destroy it in terms of image quality at 2MP – a lot of this has to do with the lenses (highly breakable vs can handle a kid,) and a lot of it has to do with the problems I mentioned on the Insta Wi where too much image data is getting compressed and chucked (which could be fixed with a firmware update).
The end result is if you’ve got an aspiring photographer, this makes their work look a little depressing and not sharp. If you know what HDR, pixilation, artifacting and the like are you’ll find examples in the images here that will make you annoyed. If you’re a kid who wants to take pictures of your friends, you’re not going to mind this at all.
The one complaint I’ll mention here is that they’re selling it as a 16MP cam and the pictures themselves are very intrinsically 1ish MP quality. I have a camera from 1999 with a plastic lens that shot 640×480 and it’s on par with that. That said, KID TECH, not trying to start my Insta Wi complaints up again except to say 16MP on this is about what 1MP on your phone is going to be.
MyFirst Camera 3 unboxing / gratuitous product placement
Shots from the MyFirst Camera 3
The images below were taken at various distances, lighting situations, etc. I have video of me taking most of them I can break out, but spare me having to be in front of the camera in a The Mountain Guinea Pig T-Shirt.
Each image should be clickable. All were taken with decent lighting. Outdoors was not overcast but ends up looking hazy blue. There are options for macro and standard photography – I used the correct settings, but in macro it seemed a tad blurry unless I was right up on its business.
Kids took a lot of pictures of their friends which I cannot post… got to say the friends look good. Scenery suffers but humans look about right. Basically CMOS image quality is about on par with 20 year old higher-end digital. Once again, not a problem for a kid’s toy. You’re not going to be doing a lot of commercial-level product work with these
Wrap up
I should really stress here that I have nothing against the camera as a kid’s toy. I have a little bit against the “16MP photos” it produces that are effectively a 1-2MP photo with all the data loss and bad lossy compression, but that’s my thing… turn it down to 3MP and see if you notice any difference in quality… the only thing I notice is a difference in file size.
Once again, great kid’s toy.
