11 von 11 Personen fanden diese Produktbewertung hilfreich.
It?s a nice camera. Good camera... Camera get's a treat!
Bewertet am: Apr 17, 2006
Fazit: The LCD is thin and easily breakable, but the photo quality is fantastic. Optical zoom, changable focus and changable shutter speeds are features you wouldn't expect in a $100 camera.
I came from a day & age when a camera s biggest distinction was between 35mm and 110mm film cartages, fixed focal lengths and zoom was you moving closer to your subject.
Well, not all that is true, but even my digital cameras were pretty impotent compared to this thing.
The M307
Although I generally don t trust HP as far as I can spit out an internal organ, people generally love their imaging products; their cameras, their scanners and their printers. Although to date I d never owned any of those things, I d like to say, the M307 does sort of buck the trend as far as HP s product quality goes.
The M307 is an unquestionably inexpensive digital still camera with a rather cheap video mode, and SD card support. It s a 3MP camera, (approximately 6 x8 photos at 300dpi) but as we probably know; just because a camera claims a lot of pixels of resolution doesn t mean the picture quality is any good.
Feature Set
This camera s feature set is pretty standard for a digital camera that doesn t get sold in the toy department. It features a light sensor, automatic flash, adjustable shutter speeds, optical (~4x) & digital zoom, and a nominally adjustable focus.
Of interest here is the fact that the camera has an adjustable shutter speed & focus options, even though neither are tightly configurable, both are features that are either only automatic (and thus, often wrong for most shooting situations) or totally fixed, especially on these cheaper digital cameras.
The camera has a pathetically small amount of built in ram, allowing it to shoot around 11 of the highest quality images, and 141 of the VGA images, along with almost 90 seconds of video. The video is recorded as MPEG-1 standard video, with minimal processing and heavy compression. The quality of the videos are nothing short of bad in this camera, but it s, again, a still camera.
The camera supports standard SD card expansions so that you can photograph to your hearts (and SD card s) content.
The camera features an integrated LCD display for previewing & reviewing your shots. The LCD is pretty cheap, though. It s not protected in any way, so it can crack in a second, which sucks, because guess how much HP wants to replace it (more than the camera is worth.)
The camera uses two AA batteries, and, if you own a base-station or AC power adaptor for the camera (not included,) you can use rechargeable AA battery cells and recharge the batteries while inside the camera.
Picture Quality
The camera has 4 image sizes for still pictures, 640x480 (VGA), 1MP, 2MP, 3MP and 3MP (Best). The latter setting uses minimal image compression to record the stills. However, the camera s size settings are only present so that the photographer doesn t have to resize the pictures after downloading them to the PC.
The camera s CCD (it s electronic eye) is of particularly high quality. The CCD works decently in lower light situations without the flash to produce images that aren t laden with heavy noise. The flash works very well on this camera to brighten the foreground of an image.
However, the flash does have a habit of producing red eye, there is a red-eye reduction mode on the camera; it doesn t work too well. Thankfully every photo program on PC has had a red-eye reduction utility since I can t even remember when.
The video mode is useful, if you re in a film studio with fantastic lighting. The images taken in video mode are heavily compressed and underlit. Using the video mode in anything other than the outdoors is begging for a fuzzy, noisy movie.
But it s primarily a still cam.
Using the Camera
This cam is reasonably easy to use, though I wouldn t put it in the point and shoots category. The default mode is both automatic camera settings with automatic flash, and if you just point-and-shoot the cam, you might not end up with the best quality picture.
You can override the camera s opinion of your shot by using the integrated menu, which isn t too bad to navigate. The menu also includes little descriptors of what each setting means when you re shooting.
As if you didn t read the instruction book already
The battery life in the camera is a bit of a mixed bag. It comes out of the box with a set of traditional lithium batteries (not Li-on), which give the cam quite a hefty boost to its battery life. However, once exhausted, traditional batteries in this cam can often seem substantially poor. This cam does suck on power.
Downloading
Downloading images to the computer can be done in two ways, as a digital camera (something Windows XP and Mac OS supports innately) and as a USB hard drive device (which almost everything supports out-of-the-box.) the camera can be configured to support one or the other using its menus. Operating the camera is pretty simple at this point, you can just use your computer to drag-and-drop the images and movies to wherever your hearts desire, and shut off the camera when you re done.
There is an HP disc containing some sort of utility program, but it is not necessary to use. If you have Windows XP or Mac OS 10.3+, you needn t worry about troubles with the PC software.
Summary
The camera takes really excellent photographs considering how cheap it is. The feature set is impressive, again considering the price, and the ease-of-use is quite impressive. The fact that the camera can function on both total autopilot, AND be occasionally overridden (with manual focus, flash and shutter speed settings) make this camera quite a sight better than your run of the mill $100 camera.
The fact that this cam is actually $150 not $100 is another thing. This camera isn t quite worth the $150 it s supposed to be, fortunately, most people seem to be clearing this sucker out in favor of newer appliances.
The unprotected LCD screen is a huge problem with this cam; it breaks really easily, and is NOT practically repairable. You need the LCD to manage the camera s menus and verify your shots you can t get around that. And the fact that the LCD is twice the camera s purchase price is utterly ridiculous.
And yes, by this camera s name, you might have determined it works with the HP photosmart series of printers. I don t own a photosmart printer.
But, if its cheap, and you are too, this is a nice little camera.
