ESOXOFFORE Kids Camera - Review

Back in June, I picked up a ESOXOFFORE 'Kids Instant Camera' from Amazon for the impressively low price of $30.00. Ostensibly, I bought it for various kids in our lives. But let's be real; I totally bought it for me.

The Amazon product page promised a fully-featured camera, but given the low price and random brand, I braced myself for disappointment.

Quirk and Flaws

Spending a few minutes with the ESOXOFFORE reveals its biggest flaw: its user experience (UX). To an adult, the buttons and menu system are clunky. To a child, they must seem utterly random.

To print a picture you've previously captured, you just have to: long press #4 to turn the camera on, press #3 three times to highlight playback, press #5 to select playback, use buttons #1 and #2 to pick the image. At some point, you need to press #5 to toggle printing. Finally, when the image you want to print is selected, press #3 to print the photo. Easy, right?

At one point, I was chatting with Shira about the camera's UX and said, you know, the camera really needs a touchscreen. Her response: wait, it doesn't have one? No wonder she struggled to get it to work.

An interesting exercise would be to tweak the buttons and camera software to be kid-friendly without significant hardware upgrades. Some obvious improvements: make the buttons into clear predictable shapes; stop using text on the buttons; and consider dropping the "OK" button and making the shutter button do double-duty for capturing photos and selecting an item.

Another quirk is that there's a single volume level for the camera. To hear audio during video playback, you need to crank the audio setting way up. This results in making the beep that occurs after pressing every button equally loud, which gets annoying quickly.

Toggling whether prints are produced or a filter is enabled can be subtle and easy to miss. This can result in wasted paper or capturing images with an unexpected filter.

But, All Isn't Lost

So the ESOXOFFORE has its flaws, but here's the thing: the photo quality of this camera is downright impressive for $30.00.

Both the digital images and "prints" are totally usable. Here are some examples (most taken by kids):

The built-in filters are surprisingly fun and are far more of an asset than I imagined.

AI, especially Google's Nano Banana, will gladly take the digital images and turn them into a fun creation. Here's L transported into the kitchen of a fancy restaurant:

Photo printing is accomplished by using a cheap thermal printer. The three rolls of receipt paper included with the camera promise about 372 photos and you can buy refills at about $0.013 cents a print. This is far more kid-friendly than $0.50 cents a print ZINK cartridges or $1.50 per photo of an Instax Fulfilm.

All this means that you can unleash your little Ansel Adams and let them shoot and print as much as they want. And if they happen to capture some amazing shots, then the quality will be good enough to share on Instagram and Facebook their blog.

To put the quality in perspective, consider the twice as expensive Phonemo printer's output against the ESOXOFFORE's.

That's impressive, right? It's possible that I could have further tuned the Phonemo's image, but the ESOXOFFORE's is solid by default.

The thermal-paper-based prints are fragile and curly. Mounting them on a standard 3x5 index card using glue tape has proven to be an easy way to increase their durability.

I also use clear packing tape to secure the loose photos to my notebook, making for an easy way to use them in a collage.

I experimented with using our laminator to protect the flimsy pictures, but this was a bad idea. The laminator works by sealing the plastic with heat, and the photo paper is printed with heat. Laminating added a layer of dark gray over the picture. It looks like cold lamination is a thing, so maybe that would work. It's hard to beat the simplicity of a strip of clear packing tape, though.

Skip or Buy?

Is the ESOXOFFORE 'worth it?' I think so! With one caveat: there are heaps of kids' cameras out there, so it's possible that another model delivers on both the UX and quality front. But until I find such a model, ESOXOFFORE is an excellent choice.

I say, buy the camera for your toddler to save your iPhone. Or, buy it for your teen with some fairy light photo clips, so they can cover their walls in fun moments. Heck, even the photographer in your life who covets pricey gear will appreciate the camera as an opportunity to find creativity through limits. In short, if you need a cheap camera that produces surprisingly usable pics, the ESOXOFFORE is a winner.