Camera Shootout: Old Point And Shoot Camera (2009) vs Vtech Kidizoom (2019)

I’ve been wanting to try camera shootout’s for a while, comparing old tech to newer tech. I have several old digital point and shoot cameras, but sadly cannot find chargers for them, so I was lucky enough to be given a camera from 2009 which I will use in this test, against a camera from 2019.

First up we have the Vivitar 8018 from 2009, an 8mp very compact camera, which at launch was budget friendly (I couldn’t find an exact price, but reviewers so spending more on a £50 camera made more sense) and in a pink colour, for every girls needs. The camera is capable of doing video and has an 8x digital zoom, which I didn’t try.

The camera I pit it against is the VTech Kidizoom 5mp camera which is strictly aimed at children. It is around £50 and is a rugged, well designed kid friendly camera. It can record videos at 320x240p, has a 4x digitial zoom, plus there are a number of games on it to keep children happy.

All images are straight from camera. I shot the Kidizoom at 640×480 resolution accidently, so downsized the 8mp Vivitar images (not that it made a difference to image quality). In 10 years, things seem to have changed a bit. That said, reviews from the time were not glowing for the Vivitar.

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And so there we have it! Two camera’s with 10 years apart. The image quality on the newer children’s camera is miles ahead of the Vivitar, but that is not the only problem. On the Kidizoom, there is a large, bright back screen, but on the Vivitar it is really hard to see the tiny, dim screen. I actually struggled to compose with the older camera as it was so bad.

I tried to edit the 8mp images from the Vivitar to bring them to a similar level to the Kidizoom, but sadly they were so noisy and there was so little dynamic range that it was impossible!

It’s been a fun little project, and I really enjoyed it. Hopefully soon I will be comparing other cameras where time separates them. I’m sure at the time, there would have been some people happy with the results. And I’m sure that children in this day and age with the Kidizoom will be more than happy with their images from this camera.

I hope you enjoyed this little bit of fun! Call back soon for more!