Good enough to buy twice!

Author's Rating:

Pros: cheap, easy, high quality

Cons: small memory

The Bottom Line: 
Worth the money and fun for the kids.

Author's Review
I bought this camera for my 9 year old last year. It works great and it was under $100.

The pictures are smaller than a multi-mega-pixel camera but I am impressed with the color quality, clarity, and depth of the pictures it takes. My kid has taken some really nice pictures with it including low light, deep colored, sunsets. If it gets too dark the pictures are grainy but so are the ones from my 3 Megapixel Olympus. In fact any camera with a small lense will not do well in low light. My father in-law's Canon with a large lense takes great night shots so the larger the lense the better low light shots you get.

My kid became quite proficient at using it including getting good at judging bad shots from the tiny LCD screen. My kid could easily manage the 9 high quality pictures the 4Mb memory can hold but every outing we went on she brought home only 9 pictures.

So, I bought a 256Mb flash memory for it and now the kid take 843 pictures at maximum quality! The batteries last as long as at least 60 pictures which as a trip to Yosemite.

It has been so much fun that I bought another one for my other kid.

By the way the software that goes with this camera is pretty good. I mean it allows you to make some really nice photo prints on an HP printer. My Olympus software is nice to use, and is faster but it must use the Windows printer driver to print which is OK but not great. The HP software makes GREAT prints. Also, the software comes with some other tricks for making photo albums and my recently discovered favorite the "memories disc" where you can make a slide show that plays on your DVD player (if it's CD-R compatible) and you can put music to the pictures. Pretty fun and pretty cool!

ps. My mother bought a non-main stream camera, and someone else gave me another off-brand. They both blow chunks when it comes to software drivers in fact we have never been able to get them to work with Windows XP. So, if it's not a Canon, Olympus, Hewlett-Packard or other MAJOR BRAND then buyer beware!