Labs

Despite being packaged in egg box-style recycled cardboard, the HP feels far from fragile. In fact, with its Humvee-style, sharp-edged aesthetic, it looks battlefield-ready. The only delicate bits are its two LCD screens: one just wasn't enough for HP, so another one has been stuck on top for status info. What with this and the 11 function buttons, the Photosmart ought to be a nightmare to use, but in fact it's surprisingly easy. Shutter and zoom are exactly where you expect. The main LCD is grainier than the Canon or Olympus, and suffers smear and exposure lag as you move around, although we liked the fact that it didn't exaggerate colour saturation like most of the other cameras.

If you're into creative photography, you'll like the HP. Not because it has silly special effects (although you can adjust saturation and sharpness), but because it lets you balance aperture against exposure. It's the only model here with an Action mode, which freezes moving subjects by using higher sensitivity

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and shorter exposure, and also lets you fix either minimum or maximum depth of field, so you can control whether objects behind or in front of your subject are in focus.

As with the Canon, you can also choose between average, centre-weighted and spot metering to sort out scenes where brightness varies. The slowest shutter speed is a less-than-generous 1/3 of a second, but that's not going to bother you unless you're particularly into night shots.

Reviewing your pics is quick and simple, with a slightly fiddly magnification function, and you can record an audio note to remind yourself why you took a shot. All the other features you'd expect are present and correct, along with a decent printed manual and friendly software if you feel the need to use it.

As you can tell, we were pretty impressed with the Photosmart. Then we took some pictures. Auto white balance was erratic: a set of four identical shots under tungsten came out with two different colour schemes, while the blue sky in an outdoor set was consistently greenish-blue, betraying a yellow cast. When we checked the pics in detail, we found high-contrast edges were fuzzed by grainy artefacts - possibly due to compression, which you can't adjust. All of our handheld low-light shots were shaky. The Photosmart does have one forte: macro shots, which were among the sharpest in this test.

The Photosmart's image quality is still not bad at all, and if you take its foibles into account you'll be able to produce some very nice shots. It's just a shame this cute little camera can't get it right on the money.