HP Photosmart R507 review

The PhotoSmart 507 joins an increasing line of impressive compact cameras from HP.

The 4.1 megapixel sensor is complemented by a 3x zoom lens manufactured by Pentax and a 7x digital extension. The R507 has a rubberised rear and aluminium front, and the finger-grip fashioned into this arrangement makes the camera comfortable to hold. Our only gripe - and it's a minor one - with the ergonomics of the HP is the video clip record button. It's situated right next to the shutter release button so it's far too easy to press this by accident and end up with a short video instead of a picture. Otherwise, all the buttons and sliders are well placed.

Although there's a slot for an SD card, the camera doesn't have one bundled, but there's 32MB of internal memory to keep you going. Eight auto modes, including aperture priority and panorama, are operated by a button on top of the unit. The R507 takes panoramic pictures in a different way to that of other cameras we've seen, as rather than overlaying a faded section of the previous picture, it highlights prominent features with a white outline. The image is still shown behind, but the lines help you trace more accurately where the join should be. The R507 then previews the stitched image, which you export to the supplied ArcSoft Panorama Maker 3 software for the final wide-angle shot.

In-camera, red-eye reduction is a feature that's finding its way on to many new cameras and this HP model is no exception. After taking a picture that contains the two tell-tale red spots, you enter playback mode and choose the 'remove red-eye' option. Green squares indicate where the camera thinks the red should be removed and you can preview what the R507 is going to do to your image or just save it straightaway. The HP did well in our red-eye test, replacing exactly the right areas. Where the problem was less obvious, though, eyes tended to turn a dark green rather than pure black. On a camera of this type whose main use will be family snaps, red-eye is going to be a problem and this feature really adds value to the HP, especially with the proliferation of direct print capable photo printers.

One other built-in feature of the R507 is its adaptive lighting technology. This enhances foreground detail where backlight is excessive. For example, in a landscape where a bright sky overpowers the metering, adaptive lighting fills in the foreground information. The detail our camera managed to reclaim wasn't that impressive, though, and it certainly won't make a badly exposed image that much better. We also noticed that this procedure increased noise in the image quite significantly. One of the advantages of digital photography is the ability to instantly review your pictures so that you have the immediate option to delete any ones you don't like and take another. The adaptive lighting control on the R507 is a nice idea but manual picture editing is still much more reliable.

Saturation and sharpness can be altered through the built-in operating system to three levels - high, medium and low. The R507 offers full colour and sepia options as well as black and white for more creative photography. Metering can be set to centre-weighted spot or an average of the whole scene, so once you've mastered the camera and want more accurate exposures, the option is there.

Image quality is very good. The colour balance and exposure of our test shots were excellent. We tested the R507 in a range of situations, inside and out, flash on and off, and it passed each test with flying colours. Red, green and blue channels were strong, and shades of these were accurate even in tricky lighting situations.