HP Photosmart R507 review

HP's latest showing in the burgeoning digital camera market is the Photosmart R507, the lower-end sibling of the R707 launched earlier this year.

The R507 carries across its stablemate's styling and ergonomic benefits, with the groove in the faceplate making the camera easy to handle and preventing fingers from straying over the flash or onto the lens. Its slight boxiness won't appeal to everyone - particularly those who will want to carry it in a trouser pocket - but the rubberised rear and aluminium front are sensible choices, and the 160g weight makes it comfortable to use single-handed.

With a 3x optical lens made by Pentax, paired with a 4.1 megapixel CCD, the R507 is capable of producing some excellent pictures. As with all digital zooms, the 7x offering on the R507 simply crops and rescales the image, although there's a useful indicator box on the LCD viewfinder to show you exactly how much you're cropping.

In our test shots, the HP invariably produced perfectly acceptable images. Colours were strong without being overly saturated, and noise and chromatic aberrations were minimal under normal conditions. Detail resolution was generally excellent, picking out complex patterns and fibres well, and skin tones were warm and natural, even when the flash was used.

Set to one of the eight automatic modes, the R507 coped well in a range of lighting situations - to the point that we rarely found the need to delve into manual adjustments. There are also several corrective functions built into the R507's menu, including effective digital red-eye reduction and adaptive lighting. The latter is useful for evening out overexposed or strongly backlit images, but don't expect miracles.

For the more inexperienced, there's also a comprehensive Help section embedded in the menu, offering tips and tricks for a variety of situations. The R507 also helps out with panoramic shots in an unusual way, detecting and outlining prominent features of the previous shot in white, making the overlay of the next shot significantly easier.

It's also helped by the high-quality 1.5in TFT which, although a touch small, is well-defined and acceptably bright in sunny conditions. You shouldn't find too many distractions elsewhere either - the R707 suffered frustrating shutter lag and a sluggish response between shots, but this is thankfully absent in the R507.

At this price, the 32MB of built-in memory is a nice touch, although you'll find it will run out frustratingly quickly if you use the highest quality. Thankfully, there's also an SD card slot on the side for relatively cheap expansion. Files can be transferred quickly over the USB 2 connection and a dockable charging unit is available as an optional extra. The 3.3V lithium-ion battery took just a few hours to charge, but lasted for more than a week of heavy use before needing a top up.

All this makes the Photosmart R507 a fine point-and-click camera which, given its bargain price, will produce some surprisingly good results. It doesn't quite manage to compete with the sheer quality and flexibility of the £255 A-Listed Sony DSC-W1, but if you don't want to pay more than £200 for a compact camera, the R507 will make an excellent choice.

Author: Christopher Brennan