Product Reviews

Just what kind of photographer are you? Do you want instant snaps? Or do you like to tinker? When you're prepared to shell out up to five hundred quid on a digital snapper, you'd better be sure.

Models like Canon's Digital Ixus, reviewed in December 2000, fall into the first category. They're slim, stylish and pricey alternatives to those slick little Advanced Photo System conventional cameras - with the added convenience that you don't have to pop down to Boots to find out how embarrassing you were at the party last night.

Tinkerers look for something more. They want flexibility. Focus settings would be good; fine-tuning of exposure, too; as well as a range of resolution options. A zoom's also a necessity for these types. And this is the market into which HP has plunged its PhotoSmart 618.

From the outset, it's clear the HP is robust. There's no svelte styling of Canon's Ixus. If anything, the 618's mock leather handgrip is a bit retro. At 300g, it's a tad heavy, but there's plenty packed in.

The 618 has a 2.11-megapixel CCD or 'charge-coupled device', the array of tiny light sensors that captures an image and turns it into digits. The number of pixels in that CCD is important, as it determines the level of detail you'll get in your pictures. Now, Epson's new PhotoPC 3000Z camera boasts a huge 3.3 megapixels (and a questionable interpolated output of 4.8 megapixels), so the HP's 2.11-megapixel CCD sounds a little less than cutting-edge. But the Epson comes with a price tag to match, while

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at £500, the HP's spec leaves you little to complain about.

Where it differs from, say, the Canon is in tweakability. HP's claim that it offers three focus modes stretches it - one of them is fixed on infinity, which you can easily do on most cameras by aiming into the far distance and half-pressing the shutter button, before framing your shot. Exposure tweaks are more worth having: CCDs are temperamental beasts, and need all the help they can get. The 618, like most conventional cameras worth their salt, allows exposure that prioritises shutter speed (so you can capture fast action) and aperture (to get decent exposure when it's gloomy). It also allows for exposure to be averaged across your picture, or centre-weighted.

The results are superb, with good contrast in most conditions. The only criticism was a slight pink cast to some of the snaps I took on a grey day. The top resolution of 1600x1200 is no cause for concern, picking out the finest of detail. At Best quality setting, you can fit 16 pics onto the 16Mb Compact Flash card supplied, with no trace of the tell-tale blockiness caused by the JPEG compression used to squeeze files sizes down. Not bad at all.

One of the HP's aces is a full 3x optical zoom - a feature that's really worth having. Digital zooms of lesser models simply blow up the existing shot, and don't add detail. Add to that the ability to shoot time-lapse, or a rapid series of shots, and you have a bit of kit that'll satisfy anyone from portrait photographers to budding naturalists and sports snappers.

The HP is not easy to use. Its menu system is overly-complex, and accessed by no less than six buttons, when the four-way jog control would have done fine. That aside, the intricacies of exposure control, formatting and resolution take only a little practice.

So is it worth your cash? Here we come back to the start. If you're a one-touch snapper, then no. You'd be happier with the simpler Canon Digital Ixus, or maybe even a cheaper model with more lowly specs. But for the endless tweaker of tweaks, there's nothing to touch it at the price.