Photographer tests children's camera. What's the result?

The Vtech Kidizoom is much more than just a camera. It has headphones, games, a colouring studio and many other functions. But I'm not really interested in them. I need to take good photos with it to impress Ramon. But what hardware am I actually dealing with?

Children's cameras

EUR84,95

VTech Kidizoom Touch 5.0

192

Children's cameras

EUR83,82

VTech Kidizoom Touch 5.0

126

Appearance: The device is pink. It's equipped with rubberised pads and therefore looks robust.
Resolution: The front camera has five megapixels and the selfie camera has two megapixels.
Lens: Available.

Despite its name, the pink monster can only zoom digitally. It's been sitting on my desk for a few days now. I have to listen to stupid comments about it from every second colleague. It's about time this thing disappeared. So I take it outside and try as best I can not to be seen with it. My goal: to produce beautiful photos.

My first test photos

After a few snapshots, I realise that this challenge could cost me my head and neck. The resolution of the camera is perhaps acceptable for children. But it doesn't meet my requirements by a long way. My previous smartphone from 2014 probably took even better pictures. Working with depth of field is an impossibility with this lens. On the screen of the Kidizoom, the pictures still look reasonably okay. On a large monitor, however, you can see the lack of sharpness and the washed-out colours at first glance.

Rethinking is the order of the day

I have to find a way to convince Ramon despite the poor photo quality of this device. The Kidizoom is at war with depth of field. So that's out of the question. How else can I add drama to the pictures? I opt for black and white photos. This eliminates the lousy colour reproduction and I can concentrate on the contrast and brightness nuances.

In the colour photo, you can see quite clearly how the blue tones in the sky are blurred. In post-processing, I increased the contrast, adjusted the brightness and straightened the angles in addition to the black and white effect.

The result

The concept is ready and the first picture of our office building looks okay. Now it's time to get serious. My plan: go out for an hour to take photos and invest an hour on the PC for post-processing. I don't have much more time. I still have to shoot the product images for our new digitec campaign. Fortunately not with the Kidizoom.

Here you can download the photos as a zip file.

Passed the challenge?

Black and white was definitely a good idea. The pictures look a lot better than my first test photos. Let's see what Ramon thinks.