Mattel Barbie Digital Camera

Author's product rating:   

Picture Quality	Satisfactory
Range & Quality of Features	Diverse
Ease of Use	Easy
Durability	Good
Overall Look & Design	Good
Value for Money	Good

Advantages:	Good for kids
Disadvantages:	Not a great memory on the camera

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

My daughter loves Barbie, so when I saw a Barbie digital camera I thought it would be a great excuse for her to take pics, and we wouldn’t waste loads of film when she took dodgy ones.

*****IN THE BOX******

Included in the box there was
- A 9-pin serial port connector. (To go in the back of your machine)
- Photo Designer digital camera
- Photo designer cdrom
- User guide

****THE CAMERA****

The camera itself is lightweight and quite large, easy for a child to grip. It’s silver in colour with a bright pink flower surrounding the lens.
Attached is a cool pink sparkly strap.

On the back of the camera there is an On/off button, self timer button and the shutter button. These are all a lovely shade of lilac.

Each button creates a different noise when pressed so hopefully the child knows whether a picture has been taken or not.

Self timer button – a series of fast sounding beeps before the shutter sound goes “click” to let you know the picture has been taken.

Light adjustment – This camera doesn’t have a flash so it may need to adjust to the light. Another sound will beep to let you know it is adjusting and you have to wait because there isn’t enough light yet.

****ON THE CDROM*****

After installing the Cdrom onto you computer the normal way, you can then have a play around in Barbie’s world without taking any pictures, and believe me, play I did.

WORLD OF BARBIE

Here you can out your pictures into Barbie’s world and create pictures with you and Barbie in her bedroom, garden, at a party and loads more.

SCRAPBOOK

Save your pics here, and also create stickers from your photos and postcards etc.

FLIP BOOK

Create a flip book using your pictures.

There are lots of little features you can play around with on the Cdrom that would take an age to list here, but the above are the main features of the Cdrom.

I bought this for Beckah for Christmas thinking she could take loads of pics for herself on the day. She was ecstatic with it, but we soon found it wasn’t going to be plain sailing.
The pin that connects to the tower on our computer has to be shared with the modem. (I know it wont be like that for all of you), so each time she wanted to upload her pics, we had to unplug the modem, and this became a bit of a hassle after a while.

Also you can only take six pictures at a time before the memory is full so uploading occurs very often when you have an eager child wanting to take loads of pics. (You can just imagine it can’t you).

When the camera is connected however you can take 20 pics, but the lead isn’t long enough for her to take anything other than people or things in our bedroom so she was a bit limited here also.

However when it came to playing on the Cdrom and adding herself into pictures with Barbie she had a whale of a time. She was forever asking to print “just one more out”, not helping our printer ink situation in the slightest, but I couldn’t very well tell her she couldn’t print anything out could I?

***SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS*****

- 16mb ram
- 4x cd rom drive
- colour monitor with 16 bit colour
- Video card capable of 16 bit graphics
- Available serial port for connection.

*****ADVANTAGES******

- Saves wasting lots of normal camera film
- A good way to introduce them to cameras
- Only cost 20GBP

*****DISADVANTAGES******

- To get sticker printer sheets etc will cost you a fortune
- Takes a 9v battery that isn’t included
- Only takes 6 pics before you have to upload them
- Picture resolution isn’t great – 160 x 120 (but then it is only for kids I suppose)

****MY OPINION*****

I am glad I bought this camera for her, and it was cheap (I got a half price Barbie and the Nutcracker video with it at the time of buying also).

The novelty soon wore off with her taking pics all the time, but that could be to do with me not wanting to unplug the modem all the time.

It’s great for taking a few pictures and then adding them into the computer, but she wouldn’t be able to take it for a day out because I know her she’d use all six shots in the first two minutes.

I would recommend buying this for children, but I think the product could be improved slightly.