Greetings and welcome to an LGR camera thing!
This time it’s the Nickelodeon Nick Click, a digital camera costing $70 when it launched
in the fall of 1999.
Now, I’ve covered several digital cameras from the 90s on LGR already, many of which
were sold as being highly affordable and simple to use.
But the Nick Click takes the cake in terms of simple cheapness, in regards to both cost
and build quality.
Its manufacturer, Mattel Media, was adamant about keeping costs low and profits high when
they launched the Nick Click, having ended 1998 on a successful note
with the Barbie Photo Designer.
The Photo Designer was not only the first digital camera marketed towards kids, but
it was the lowest-cost digital camera on the market period, and sold over 300,000 units
in North America alone in its first year.
So Mattel and its investors were more than ready for a repeat success, launching the
Nick Click in hopes of generating even greater numbers in 1999 by leaning into their Nickelodeon
TV network partnership.
And I mean, how could they go wrong with an affordable digital camera encased in trendy
translucent plastic, combined with 3D animated print center software featuring the likes
of Rugrats, CatDog, Rocko’s Modern Life, Angry Beavers, and Hey Arnold?
Well, it turns out things could go pretty wrong for Mattel,
as their 1999 annual investors report revealed.
Not only did their acquisition of The Learning Company go disastrously wrong, resulting in
an operating loss of $206 million dollars, but the kids digital imaging market was far
more crowded by the time the Nick Click launched in the fall of ‘99.
There were several competing digital cameras by then, including the WWF Slam Cam, the JamCam
2.0, the Vivitar eCam, and the KLH DCL-450, all under a hundred bucks and with better specs as well.
So while the Nick Click wasn’t a total loss for Mattel, it only lasted about a year on
the market before inventory was cleared out at a drastically reduced price, while the
Barbie Photo Designer continued to sell and went onto be launched in UK and European markets
in the year 2000.
As ya might expect, tons of inventory went unsold and languished in warehouses for a
couple decades, so new old stock packages like this one aren’t hard to find.
Even still, I’d always found it a bit odd that Nick Clicks are almost exclusively found
either sealed in box or loose with no box at all.
Turns out there’s a good reason for that: it’s pretty much impossible to open without
destroying the packaging.
And that’s because the whole thing is sealed shut with gobs of hot glue.
Yeah this bothers me.
I typically try to keep my boxes looking as new as possible when I open stuff on LGR,
but I just about gave up with this one.
Beyond that glue slathered all over the place, the design of the cardboard itself prevents
access to things like the CD jewel case, and the camera is trapped inside a plastic blister
that’s adhered to the box art.
So whatever, I did my best.
Beyond the camera, cable, and CD-ROM, you get a fold-out pamphlet letting you know all
the stuff you can do with the included software, and a 30-page manual that is surprisingly
convoluted and hard to follow in certain spots.
For a Nickelodeon kids product I’d expect a bit more than boring rows of monochrome
text, but I guess this was meant for the boring monochrome parents.
With everything freed from its late-90s retail sarcophagus, we can finally take a closer
look at the camera.
Immediately you have to appreciate its usage of translucent plastic, along with its overall
chunky design that almost makes it look like a waterproof camera.
Almost.
And despite its protruding lens area around front, the Nick Click uses a fixed focus narrow
angle lens, with an aperture of not really, an ISO rating of nope,
and a shutter speed of you’re joking.
Seriously, the specs are the absolute bare minimum, even for 1999.
Wanna guess the resolution of the CMOS sensor?
1 megapixel?
Half a megapixel?
A quarter megapixel? Nope!
The Nick Click boasts a 0.1 megapixel sensor, shooting at a whopping 160x120 resolution.
Yep, that’s 19.2 kilopixels, or 19,200 pixels altogether.
Not only that, but it has absolutely no removable storage, so you’re stuck with its internal
fixed storage of 300 kilobytes.
Meaning that even though the resulting photos are only 160x120 in size,
you can only shoot and store six of them.
SIX.
Lastly, there’s no rechargeable battery included, which isn’t that unusual for a
camera like this.
But what is a bit a strange is the fact that it requires a 9-volt, you know, the kind you’d
typically stick in a walkie talkie or a smoke detector.
And using the Nick Click is as simple as it looks.
The button on the left turns it on illuminating a static red LED.
And pressing the shutter button on the right takes a photo,
followed by an obnoxiously loud beeping noise. [BEEP]
The only other button is the self-timer, activated by pressing the red button in the
middle and followed by even more obnoxious noise.
[steady beeping noises]
[picture takes with a beep]
And yes it does have a standard
tripod mount underneath, which I honestly did not expect considering how many corners
were cut otherwise.
[loud camera beeping again]
This thing really is noisy though, louder than any other digital camera I own.
But it kinda needs to be considering it has no display of any kind, not even a blinking LED.
Everything is communicated by loud beeping, with this noise playing whenever the memory’s full.
[memory full noise]
And if you want to delete individual images, then too bad.
All you can do is hold down the shutter button for five seconds until you hear this sound
[shrill noise] And now you can start taking photos again, but only because you’ll be
overwriting whatever was stored in memory beforehand.
Getting images off the Nick Click means hooking it up to a Windows PC using the included serial
cable and this 3.5mm jack on the left-hand side.
And yep, that’s a 3-pole plug on the end, just like you’d see on a pair of headphones.
With that plugged into the camera and the 9-pin serial side plugged into a compatible
PC, all that’s left is the Nick Click software package on CD-ROM.
And in typical Nickelodeon fashion, everything about it is loud, even the installation.
[upbeat Nick music plays]
Amusingly, you can’t actually choose the size of the installation
since it all streams off the CD.
But you can choose how much hard disk space will be reserved for photos, something I have
never seen before and is a bit silly considering how tiny each picture actually is.
And now to dive into the Nick Click Digital Camera program, accompanied by more music
and narrated by a faceless youngster.
-Welcome to Nick Click! Where you are the star!
Grabbing photos from the camera’s memory is easy stuff.
Just make sure it’s powered on and then click the camera graphic from the Upload screen.
It’ll then take thirty years to download each photo, one by one.
[shutter sound effect plays] Oh my goodness
[laughs] Oh could it be any slower?
Eventually you’ll have access to your photos and you can either start playing with them
immediately or export them as a bitmap or JPEG image and open them directly.
And man oh man, even knowing that they’d be 160x120 resolution, the resulting images
are still incredible to behold.
What is this, a digital camera for ants? Pretty much!
And it’s a far cry from what was advertised, both on the box itself and in the TV commercials.
-He turned me into Hey Arnold, so I threw pies at him in space.
-Do the Nick Click!
-She made of movie of me, so I printed postcards of her.
-Do the Nick Click!
Yeah, no indication that the screen images are obviously simulated, just “do the Nick Click”
and make it look all cool and stuff when in reality it’s lower resolution than
Duck Hunt on the NES.
Oh well, at least it makes for some darned challenging photography.
As usual, I like to take photos of the same kinds of scenes with each camera I review
so you can compare between cameras.
But with the Nick Click, everything is so low-res and awful that it’s kind of an exercise in futility.
The sheer unpredictability of each resulting shot makes this curiously enjoyable to use
though, with everything being a complete crapshoot as to how it’ll look.
From exposure, to focusing, to white balance, to whether or not you can line anything up
using its absolutely awful viewfinder.
Everything tends to skew to the left, I found, so half of what I shot ended up cut off on
the right hand side.
And of course, since you can only take six photos at a time, each picture ends up being
a bit more carefully considered than you would with pretty much any other digital camera.
And just for fun, let’s compare the Nick Click to a modern cell phone with this scene
of a smiling dude and a tiger in a cage.
No seriously, that’s what this is supposed to be, as you can see from the phone’s camera.
[chuckles] Yeah, all right, it’s entirely pointless to do any of these kinds of comparisons,
but it amuses me regardless.
The Nick Click is without a doubt the lowest-quality digital camera I currently own and it’s
actually kind of awesome because of it.
But of course, the main intended use of the camera is the software it came with, filled
with classic 90s Nickelodeon characters down for manipulation.
From left to right there are four primary activity rooms: Publicity, Director’s Studio,
Nicktoons Props, and FX.
The publicity room is the most straightforward print studio aspect of the program, where
the whole idea is to drop your photos onto printable templates.
So you can make things like postcards, name badges, and letter-sized poster printouts
from any of your magnificent 160x120 resolution pictures.
And being that the pictures aren’t very impressive on their own, you can overlay text
and graphics on top of them from a library of Nickelodeon artwork.
Each one has a transparent cutout for plopping pictures inside of it, usually in a small
frame or a cutout of a character’s face.
With uh, very mixed results depending on the character.
And that’s it, nothing too surprising here.
Next up is the director’s studio, an editor that lets you turn your pictures into a digital flipbook.
The program calls them movies, but truthfully that’s stretching the definition to the
point of absurdity.
Really all you’re doing here is placing photos into a premade slideshow template alongside
some goofy animations and sound effects.
And well, the results are unique.
[strange cacophony of sound effects] Uh, was that it?
[bizarre layers of noise repeats]
Aw man, that’s some Oscar material right there.
The best part of this is the quote unquote “real time movie maker” mode.
The Nick Click doesn’t do video or even let you watch a live image feed, so instead
it plays a rap of sorts letting you know when it’s about to take a photo.
-You can jump around, you can play the fool
-You can act real tough or you can act real cool
-But whatever it is you decide to do
-We’re gonna take a picture when you hear this cue!
[shutter ‘whipping’ sound plays] [music continues]
The Nick Click snaps a photo during that whipping noise, and once it’s done processing the
song continues, moving onto another verse prepping you for the next photo, up to a total of 36.
Pretty clever solution actually, with the music allowing for enough time between shots
so that the Nick Click and your PC have enough time process each image over the serial connection.
Again, the results are a bit lacking, with very little in the way of Nickelodeon content
for that matter.
But I appreciate the creative workaround for a camera that doesn’t show a live feed.
The third area is called Nicktoons Props, which is much more in line with what you’d
expect for a Nickelodeon print activity center.
There’s a work area up top with a bunch of preset backgrounds, and there are eight
Nicktoons to choose from at the bottom of the screen, each with a selection of character
components that you can plop onto the photos of your choosing.
There’s also an image editor built-in that lets you erase and re-arrange parts of each
picture to help make it more suitable to each prop.
It’s horrendously slow and finicky to use, but hey, the results speak for themselves I think.
A true masterpiece of modern art.
And lastly, there’s the FX room, one of the bigger selling points of the software
in all the advertising I’ve seen for the Nick Click.
The first step is to choose an appropriate photo and map it onto the blank face of the
bust on the bottom left.
And from here it’ll be mapped onto 3D models of a gorilla, an astronaut, and a scuba diver.
All so you can do this.
[cheap jungle music plays, bananas catapult]
[chuckles a bit] I mean, it’s something.
Heh, okay I’ll admit I would have thought it was pretty cool to see my face mapped onto
a 3D character model in the 90s.
I was certainly impressed with all the sports games that let you plop your face onto custom
players back then.
But yeah, the thing with the FX room here is it just doesn’t let you do that much
with what you’ve created.
Each of the three characters have the same four things along the bottom of the screen,
reworked a bit to fit the current theme.
One option shoots items from the bottom of the screen, the next lets you drop turds from
a bird along the top of the screen, and the other two are canned animations that do something
to ruin your character’s day.
Electric eel, slamming into a tree, getting sucked into a black hole that looks suspiciously
like a spiral galaxy, you get the idea.
And yeah, that’s it really!
For the software and the Nick Click camera for that matter.
They’re both pretty basic in terms of functionality, neither are all that impressive on a technical
level, even for 1999.
But that is absolutely not why I’m drawn to these kinds of things.
Retro activity centers, crappy digital cameras, and electronic kids products just entertain
the crap outta me the older I get.
It’s not even nostalgia half the time, I had
zero experience with the Nick Click before this video.
I’m more interested in the marketing aspect, the trade offs they made when designing it,
and the very act of using such an outdated thing today for no other reason than to look
back at how amusingly simplistic it is.
So yeah, the Nick Click!
Lemme know if you used one of them back in the day, or the Barbie Photo Designer or any
of the other competing cameras I mentioned.
I’d be curious to hear your experiences since I didn’t know anyone who had any of
these things back then.
And if you’d like more content like this,
then feel free to wander around the LGR YouTube channel.
I’ve covered a bunch more stuff like this in the past and more is to come in the future,
with new videos every week right where you’re watching right now.
And as always thank you very much for watching LGR!