HP Photosmart R927 and Dock review

Eight is the magic number.

It's the number of megapixels found in the majority of semi-pro digitals SLRs for the last year, and it's increasingly becoming the number of choice for compact, pocket-friendly snappers such as the HP Photosmart R927 and Dock. It's plenty big enough for an A3 print, gives you loads of room for creative cropping and, at about twice the resolution of an equivalent camera from this time last year, is an impressive feat of miniaturisation.

The R927 is about the size of a pack of cards, is moulded from smart brushed metal and has a 7.6cm screen on the back, which is easily read in bright sunlight even with the brightness turned down low. The optical zoom tops out at 3x, which when combined with a crop-and-enhance digital zoom, gives you a surprisingly usable 24x in total. Take it as read that the pictures are good (colours are bright and realistic, lighting is well handled and detail is sharp despite the 1/1.8in sensor). But what we're really interested in is the use to which HP puts that screen.

For starters, it's home to a first-class set of menus that give you access to the kind of tools you would expect from a low-end image editor. You want to make your pictures sepia? No trouble. Get rid of red-eye? Done. Apply frames, torn edges or a kaleidoscope effect? Sure: they're all just two clicks away. It may sound like a gimmick, but it's great for the more ambitious home user, particularly if you plan on printing directly from the card.

Best of all, though, none of these features are destructive. Whether you're changing the colour of the sky or - our favourite - applying the slimming filter, which can make your image-wary subject look less weighty than they actually are, the adjustments are applied to a separate copy of your image so your original is preserved intact. The most impressive feature is the in-camera panorama stitching, which creates almost flawless landscapes, with perfectly blended skies and no sign of any seams or stepping. Realviz Stitcher, watch out.

The automatic exposure settings handle everything from bright sunlight or sporting events to nighttime photography with rear curtain flash, and are supplemented by a custom option where you can save your most-used settings. This is impressive, as it gives you full manual control of the camera, tweaking ISO (100-400), exposure compensation (+/- 3.0EV in 1/3EV steps), aperture (f2.8-f8.5 depending on zoom) and shutter speed (16-1/2000 sec) to a fine degree. There's also an ingenious manual-focusing tool that magnifies the central portion of your image to ease precise tweaking.

This is a semi-pro compact in every sense of the word, so it's refreshing to see that enormous screen put to good use with illustrated examples of what each setting will do, and a dunce-friendly help system that will analyse any shot you've already taken and tell you what might be wrong and how it can be improved before you try again.

The bundle we're reviewing here comes with a Dock for downloading your images or displaying them on TV at the same time as charging the two included batteries. They can both be plugged in at the same time, with one in the camera and the other sliding into the base unit. A cheaper pack lets you buy just the camera on its own without the dock or second battery, but as the saving is just under £35, we would recommend taking this combo if you can possibly afford it.

The HP Photosmart R927 is as close to perfect as you're likely to get in a camera at this price and of this size. The only complaint we can level is that shots played back on the built-in screen look a little soft, although as this is in no way representative of how they'll look on your Mac, it would be churlish to dock it a mouse on this point. It's not a digital SLR replacement, but it comes close to matching many of its pro cousins' features in a case you can carry anywhere.