I can't help but wonder if this is a purchase for himself.
This is a bizarre article. The elephant in the room is on the lower end most mid-range phones will beat a digital camera under 300$.
I wouldn't give a kid an expensive camera. Kids drop things. If you give Junior an 850$ camera and he loses it that's on you.
Then again, this is HN. Maybe he makes 700k TC per year and money is no object. Even then he admits for a few hundred more you can get a much more capable Fuji camera.
I purchased a used Fujifilm Fuji X-A5 for around 250$ off eBay, and a new XC 15-45 for 120$. It's not the best camera by any means, but I'm relatively stress free when using it compared to more expensive options.
Truth be told when your starting out you don't really need amazing gear. This goes for every hobby.
For anything more than basic software-processed output and utility snaps or selfies, this high-end phone loses pretty terribly to an average hybrid consumer camera.
They describe this camera as "cheap" even!
Amazing probably not, but you also don’t want the cheapest and crappiest gear especially when you’re starting. A pro can usually workaround the limitations, but for a novice they would be like a wall and would only cause frustration.
I shoot a Panasonic G9 II and thats a completely different level.
One of the reasons I go around with two Sonys in my backpack is that I can go to an event and take action shots while I put the other body with a 90mm lens and have somebody else who doesn't know a lot about how to work a mirrorless shoot headshots. On the other hand, I do collect weird cameras and you might find I have two stereo cameras in my other bag.
Or, if it needs to be a zoomable lens, I'd look for some used (but well maintained) Digital Ixus or PowerShot.
With either of these they can learn much more about photography than with a toy camera.
I've taken pictures with a 7MP 1/1.8" sensor PowerShot that look so good the prints still hang in several family members' houses. And not because they are photos of people, I'm talking macros and underwater photography (the latter with an original Canon waterproof case and a DIY-contraption with an optically slaved 1970s Nikonos flash).
If you put the work in and ignored the DSLR crowd, those cameras were fantastic. I had a full tilt LCD screen in 2005. That feature is completely standard today, but it took the DSLRs a full decade to catch up. On the later models you got 20x, even 40x optical zoom with decent apertures.
With CHDK we had global electronic shutter working down to 1/30,000 of a second. We wrote code than ran on our cameras to do motion detection for stuff like lightning photography. We scripted timelapses with exposure control that factored in sunset timings. We scripted focus and exposure bracketing for HDR and infinite DoF. That was twenty years ago, on an undocumented 32-bit architecture that people painstakingly reverse engineered.
The only thing we could never get was bokeh on the telephoto end. Optics is a harsh mistress.
The Panasonic 20/1.7 is an amazing little lens but its autofocus is absolutely horrible. I used to carry it and an E-M5 (the first one) and the shots were great but AF was near useless.
But you're correct that if picture quality and ease of use are the main points of contention, a used iPhone or used Pixel phone is probably all you need to get sharp pictures and decent auto-HDR.
That's not to say that an $850 Fuji body is the only way forward. I'd probably buy a younger kid a used point-and-shoot and buy an older kid one of those cheaper compacts. That Fuji body is almost as expensive as a real mirrorless that I shoot with for paid work.
Most "kids cameras" sold today just use cheap webcam sensors (e.g. 1 MP, low dynamic range) that are sold for excessively high prices. They have few physical controls, no viewfinder, and are bulky.
Instead, why not grab a used iPhone SE, the camera sensor is still fantastic, and it will likely cost you less than most kids cameras. Remove everything except the Camera App, leave it in Airplane mode, and it will last roughly two days on a single charge (over a week idle).
PS - You can find deals on used cellphones by looking for "network locked" ones, since you won't be putting a SIM in it anyway.
Beyond framing, though... The sensor is pretty meh; use an app like Halide to take fully-unprocessed raw shots (not still-Apple-processed Raw out of the camera app) to compare. The processing is good, with a caveat - it's good at producing a certain look, but there's limited ability to go beyond that with the default software.
Still, old iPhone + Halide will let you learn a decent bit about exposure and shutter speed and ISO. Not being able to control aperture is gonna be your biggest drawback in terms of learning about photography. But having a sensor that's a bit less forgiving than a Fuji one might be good for playing with - make the hard decisions about framing instead of just assuming everything will always be well-exposed. (I haven't used the X-half, but a considerably cheaper used X-whatever would be much better than a 2020 iPhone for non-computationally-processed shots).
$850, that price point is dead in the water to me. I may as well move up to other Fuji cameras that provide far more for not that much more money.
It's a "perfect family camera" if you don't consider the price...
It might be an okay intro-to-"real"-cameras device, since it's far less huge-and-clunky than an equivalently priced DSLR. But even there the tradeoffs don't look great.
Most people who consider prices don't.
My kid recently asked about getting a stand alone camera. I found this one, but at that price, they needed to have a really good reason. In the end, I told them to use their phone anyway.
“¯\_(ツ)_/¯“
The only thing is price is way too high for what it is. As much fun as I would have with it, $800 is too much for what it is. And that is definitely too high for something you're handing to your kids. Anyone with kids knows that kids tend to break things or lose things pretty frequently.
I have a "camp snap" camera that costs something like $50 (was even less when I bought it) and operates similar to the Fuji in that it's one button to take a picture, no screen so you don't see it until later. Yeah, the quality isn't as high as your $10,000 body only Leica M11... but as it says here "the sensor is too small, but the kids didn’t care".
I also have a thermal print kids camera that my two year old son loves to carry around, although he more or less just snaps random photos of the ground and doesn't point it at anything. It's a blast for me to take out with friends sometimes too, since the cost of receipt paper makes it maybe two cents for an instant printed photo with a nice black and white dithered look. The battery does go pretty quick when the printer is on but the camera was less than $20.
For a more adult camera, you can get a decent something used for maybe $200 that will take fairly high quality photos (much better than the Fuji in question).
But a Kodak Pixpro FZ55 or FZ45. Brand new for $130 or less, beats even the best smartphones, and are Japan's top selling cameras for a reason.
One of those instant print cameras (and a limited budget) is probably best for teaching people to see, which is the core skill in photography. The pain of having to pay for refills is a major part of that learning experience.
There might be whole new market in between X-half, toy cameras and iPhones. Try shooting anything except your phone, and you will drown in ISO settings, different photography modes, and dealing with sloppy "effects" if you want to adjust any colors in-camera. Experience just is not there.
If what author is describing hits home for more families, and someone can make the same package for quarter of the price, it could be an instant hit. Now it is just an empty niche with a single [and arguably overpriced] solution in it.
Under 8, they just want anything and may break things by curiously pressing everything.
At ~10 they may want to just take pictures, not bother with the tuning at all.
By ~18, sure they go into details and want some perfection. But they'll decide for themselves what they need. To let them try and see if they like photography, anything that doesn't break will work.
I bought an old (~40 years) used film camera ( https://licm.org.uk/livingImage/Zenit-E-360deg.html ), overpriced at $10. A 36 Kodak film roll costs more. It takes time to end the roll and carry it to a photostudio. But it has a lot of charm - sometime it applies overexposure filters on the edges, sometimes I miss the focus. Blur is plenty, because the lens has low light power. Plenty of grain and yellowish hue. I let the kids play with it when empty.
Also: iPhone cameras don't seem like they're ever going to replace a hard camera for me. They can take incredibly photos, but the processing is just so HDR heavy and approaching Canon's sterile level of accuracy, they don't have the character I want in photos I'd print and display around my home.
As for this thing in the article, urgh. Old cameras were designed badly and had poor ergonomics because of mechanical constraints. Why do we keep copying shitty old designs?!?
https://support.apple.com/guide/assistive-access-iphone/came...
Assistive access is an amazing mode for kids and adults with accessibility problems and I'm constantly surprised that Apple doesn't promote it more.
I have no qualms giving kids from 2+ this camera to wander around shooting with.
There are some very good YouTube channels talking about micro four thirds cameras, which are still a good choice, especially when used as a camera to carry every day.
Disclaimer, own and use full frame, APS-C, and even Ixus and Powershot cameras which all can produce decent images if one knows how and when to use them. Oh, smartphone, of course.
Fond memories, I carried that camera all over the world for 6 years.
Yeah, the first two are 35mm film, but they’re phenomenal cameras within the scope of what they are (fixed lens rangefinders - basically the 1970s version of today’s Fuji X100). The E-M5 hasn’t let me down, and the latest models from OM don’t offer enough to make me upgrade (and I have little desire to switch mounts).
For that price you can get a cellphone with 200megapixels.
That uses a ton of magic protocols that arent well explained to produce better pictures than any handheld.
I just checked eBay and they're going for 2x what I paid for my replacement a few years ago. I bet a seller would take a more modest Best Offer though, there are a ton of listings.
And that's not "monkey see, monkey do" either. Daddy still uses real cameras. This is their own, natural preference.
> [wifi didn’t work]
It’s bad that in 2025, digital cameras do not ship with a way to automatically upload to Apple and Google’s photo libraries, for free, and clearing the local storage as images and videos get uploaded.
But id really prefer Airdrop
