HP Photosmart R707 Review
Simon Joinson, August 2004

Review based on a production Photosmart R707

At press briefings during PMA 2004 HP staff quietly admitted they had finally realized that the company's digital cameras suffered from something of an 'image problem'. Big, seemingly designed to resemble a house brick, and made from the kind of materials normally found only on the dashboard of a 1980's hatchback, the Photosmart range simply couldn't compete with the slick, shiny and keenly priced Far Eastern offerings. From now on, we were told, HP cameras would be designed for style, speed and ease of use, and would no longer be twice the size of their direct competitors. The 5 megapixel, 3x zoom, Photosmart R707 is the first of this new wave of slimmed-down, metal-bodied HP cameras, offering a tempting mix of thoughtful design and some genuinely innovative features. Most of these are aimed at ensuring less experienced users avoid common photographic pitfalls, something possible mainly due to the inclusion of a clever Texas Instruments Digital Signal Processor (DSP). The power of the DSP is obvious when you look at some of the features it has allowed HP to shoehorn into the R707:

• Adaptive lighting technology ('digital fill flash')
• In-camera red-eye removal
• MPEG movie mode
• Comprehensive on-screen camera instructions
• In-camera panorama stitching (preview)
• 'Image advice' - on-screen help system that analyses saved pictures, identifies problems and suggests how they could have been avoided.

Key specifications

If you're new to digital photography you may wish to read the Digital Photography Glossary before diving into this article (it may help you understand some of the terms used).

Conclusion / Recommendation / Ratings are based on the opinion of the reviewer, you should read the ENTIRE review before coming to your own conclusions. Images which can be viewed at a larger size have a small magnifying glass icon in the bottom right corner of the image, clicking on the image will display a larger (typically VGA) image in a new window. To navigate the review simply use the next / previous page buttons, to jump to a particular section either pick the section from the drop down or select it from the navigation bar at the top. DPReview calibrate their monitors using Color Vision OptiCal at the (fairly well accepted) PC normal gamma 2.2, this means that on our monitors we can make out the difference between all of the (computer generated) grayscale blocks below. We recommend to make the most of this review you should be able to see the difference (at least) between X,Y and Z and ideally A,B and C.

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