If ever there were a case of somebody soldiering on in the face of scant recognition, it's HP and its cameras. While well regarded for printers, scanners, PCs, servers, in fact most areas of IT, its cameras are hardly ever mentioned alongside the Nikons and Canons of this world, or even the Olympuses and Fujifilms. Some of HP's cameras deserve better, certainly alongside the latter two names.
The Photosmart R927 is a compact digital camera with an 8.2-megapixel sensor and a 76mm (3-inch) LCD monitor. These two specs alone should make it worth a look, but it also comes with two Lithium-Ion rechargeable batteries and a purpose-made dock/recharger.
There are fewer controls on the Photosmart 927 than on many cameras in the same market, with a set of four along the top edge plus power, shutter release and video start/stop. On the back there's a toggle for wide-angle to zoom and a menu button with a four-way ring around it for navigation.
One of the delights of using the Photosmart R927 is its logical interface. With a series of main categories along the top of the screen, each one breaks down in a vertical menu down the left-hand side. With the large LCD screen there's space for help text, too, so the camera can explain how to do things and what effect each option will have.
There's a set of slightly gimmicky in-camera effects, such as watercolour, retro and kaleidoscope. If you have a good, full-body portrait, you can even apply the slimming filter, which squeezes the centre of the image and expands the edges. The effects on this reviewer were stunning, if a little disconcerting.
Of more general use are in-camera red-eye removal and adaptive lighting. HP pioneered adaptive lighting, which brings up the detail in shadows when there's a high contrast between light and dark areas, and it makes a worthwhile difference to many shots. It's a bit like an automated gamma adjustment, applied dynamically over an image.
In use the camera takes sharp, well-adjusted photos in automatic mode, but you can select manual and aperture or shutter priorities, too. There are 13 other pre-set modes, ranging from snow to night portrait to beach, and you can take panoramas left to right or right to left and have the camera stitch them together. It's disappointing only to have a 3x optical zoom, but HP has tried to compensate with the 8x digital zoom afforded by its large sensor.
