HP PhotoSmart 812 review

If digital cameras carry on plummeting in price the way they have recently, you'll soon be able to pick up a free one with your pack of All Bran.

Even the most basic cameras used to cost around £500, but now HP brings out a 4-megapixel, silver-clad offering for just £299. Surely this is too good to be true?

Well, yes. For one, it's not actually clad in silver. The material is plastic rather than precious metal, but this is forgivable in such a well-priced piece of equipment. And although I wouldn't want to drop the 812 too frequently, it can slip into your bag without fear of breakage. Its durability is helped by a lens that retracts back into the casing before acover snaps shut to protect the glass - a nice touch.

I was less impressed by the churning noise the motor makes as it moves the lens back and forth. Don't expect to zoom for a sneaky close-up without attracting the kind of looks you'd expect if your mobile phone had just gone off. Still, I shouldn't moan too much, as the 3x optical zoom is one of this camera's best features.

In fact, combine this with the 4-megapixel (which converts to a resolution of 2,272x1,712) CCD and surely, I thought, we have a potential winner on our hands. So, my breath firmly baited, I took a few photos. Well, five to be precise, as that's all that fits onto the 16Mb card before it's filled up when you're using best quality.

On examining the photos on the 1.5in TFT screen, my hopes took a knock. The flash looked ineffective; colours appeared washed out; and there was a distinct lack of crispness. Just a quirk of the TFT viewing screen, I decided, and quickly transferred them to my PC. Only to find that the flash was ineffective, colours washed out, and there was a distinct lack of crispness.

I took a few more photos, hoping that the first few were just bad luck. They weren't. So I double-checked all the settings. This doesn't take long - you're only allowed to adjust the quality of JPEG compression, rather than mess about with white balance, exposure timings and all that jazz. Most disappointingly, you can't even reduce the resolution, which means that whatever quality setting you use, that 16Mb card will soon be full.

Having established that this wasn't a camera for indoors, I crossed my fingers for its outdoor abilities. And it's undeniably better. The colours were still slightly washed out, and the definition not quite as crisp as I'd like, but acceptable. Ish. They might need a little bit of work in your photo-editing programme of choice, but the 812 picks up plenty of detail.

More in hope than expectation, I moved onto the Macro mode, which again deserves the accolade of acceptability. It's helped by the massive resolution, after all, so details are picked up extremely well. It's just a shame that you can't focus any closer than 14cm.

There are a couple of nice touches elsewhere as well. You can print directly without using a PC, the focus aid is one of the best we've seen, and the movie mode does a reasonable job (just don't expect great sound quality). For an extra £53, you can even buy a handy docking station - called the PhotoSmart 8881 - which can hook up to your TV as well as your PC.

But it's not enough. HP should have given itself an extra £100 budget for this camera, so that the optics and electronics were up to today's highest standards. Instead, it's opted for the big numbers approach, and it just doesn't work. Most people don't need 4 megapixels - a 2-megapixel camera produces pictures at 1,600x1,200, which is more than good enough for printing and viewing on screen. Save yourself £100 and buy the Canon PowerShot A40 instead.

Author: Tim Danton