Bratz Digital Video Camera

My 7 year old daughter desperately wanted a video camera so she and her friends could make music videos together.  Since it was all she wanted for her birthday, I began the hunt.  First off, I would have never in my life paid the $79.99 retail price for this Bratz digital video camera.  I got it on clearance at a significant discount.  I did not have high expectations of the image quality or sound, I just hoped it would satisfy my 7 year old.

The camera defninitely met my low expectations.  The image quality is actually not that bad if you are in an intensely bright lighting situation.  The trouble is, under normal inside conditions, it is almost impossible to get enough light to get an image at all.  My daughter has cleverly rigged up some "spotlights" so she can stage scenes, but it is really a pain.  The camera claims to have an LCD light to brighten dark conditions but this does absolutely nothing.

I also dislike the design of the camera.  The flip out screen seems very flimsy and even I have trouble getting it open sometimes and am afraid it is going to break, especially if it gets dropped.  The battery compartment is also hard to open.  It has 32 MB of built in memory and can be expanded with a card.  So that's not too bad since my daughter usually just makes a couple movies then downloads or deletes them.

The editing software that comes with the camera seems ok.  We haven't really played around with it much but it looks like it will work fine for anything my daughter might want to do.  All in all, I wouldn't recommend this camera unless you find it at under $30.  I would definitely not spend $80 on it, I would invest more money and get a real camera!  The biggest plus to this camera is that it does take fairly decent digital still pictures, so it does have that use.