- The Good: Plenty of features tacked onto internal software. Adaptive lighting mode does a great job illuminating high contrast areas. Image editing made easy via interface. Has 32MB of internal memory for those last-minute shots with a full card.
- The Bad: Night shooting and macro settings have noticeable weak spots. Three-inch screen sometimes shows too much noise. The 30x overall zoom is misleading because of the digital zoom taking up an overwhelming part of it.
- The Verdict: HP delivers more than just a point-and-shoot camera.
Despite Hewlett-Packard's struggles to develop a digital camera that would give them an edge in the digital photography arms race, they are making an effort. Each new generation of HP cameras sees an improvement in quality, thanks largely to enhanced sensors and lenses.
The HP Photosmart R967 is the company's first 10-megapixel camera and it comes with some slick new features that include editing pictures through the camera's interface. There's also a large three-inch LCD screen to review photos, which are unlikely to be blurry because of the built-in "steady photo anti-shake" mode.
Camera ... check! PC ... check! Wait a minute ...
From the opening snapshot, the R967 is an intriguing piece of hardware because you have the ability to manipulate and edit images without hooking the camera up to a PC.
The onus here has largely been focused at visual elements that are meant to help you personalize photos as much as possible from within the device. It's a great idea, and works well here, but it also deviates from some of the issues that affect those same images.
When HP unveiled the R967 months ago, one of the hallmarks was the "slimming" feature, which literally shrunk the waistline of the subject in the photo. While it's a nice feature to have, it overcompensates often by making subjects too thin for their actual body type. Hyperbole aside, the "slimming" feature is a novel idea but needs work in order to be more relevant.
This, however, is not true of some of the other visual treats that are offered within the R967. Taking a page out of the Photoshop playbook, you can turn a photo into a something akin to a painting or cartoon drawing, or even just change it to black and white, sepia tone or even give it an antique look.
Throw in all the different borders you can place on a photo and you get a visual editing package that is pretty impressive when it all comes inside the unit.
Modes to capture moods
The different shooting modes also make things interesting, and while many perform admirably well, there are a couple that underachieve. Shooting night skylines with the R967 should be an easy process because the sensor inside immediately works to help you by picking the right shutter speed and ISO for you.
The problem is that the sensor sometimes assumes that there is more light coming into the lens than there actually is, so the image ends up being underexposed. You can adjust the ISO and shutter manually to get the shot you want, but this comes as a surprise since night shooting has been a standard mode for digital cameras for years.
Indeed, the sensor needs a lot of time to capture an image at night, more so than models from competitors. This is also partially true for the macro setting. The range isn't bad but it takes some time to capture the photo, and the anti-shake feature doesn't always bail you out from moving your hand.
If you see the light, the camera won't
But these are also two modes that are not as widely used as the others, and this is where the R967's strength lies. The flash is so well calibrated, that it can function beautifully as a fill flash when necessary — assuming that you even need it. There's an adaptive lighting feature that works to bring out more light from darker areas without the need for a flash. So, for instance, if you were to shoot a subject standing in front of a window, the adaptive lighting would bring out the subject and lessen the intensity of light coming in from the window.
This is important because shooting backlit subjects is difficult in any automatic shooting mode. But the adaptive lighting is meant to augment the darker tones in just about any image that needs an extra boost.
This is partly why HP plays up its 30x overall zoom, but the digital zoom makes up an overwhelming part of that, which isn't a great thing. The digital zoom, at its full extension, will literally concentrate pixels in the very middle of the photo, so if you were to print a poster-size image, you'll get plenty of pixilation on the periphery.
There's still a lot to like about this camera, despite a few drawbacks. It's been loaded with features and tries to offer something for everyone, regardless of the level of experience involved. At a price tag in excess of $400, it may not be a starter for beginners, but it sure could be an upgrade for anyone else.
