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HP are known for printers both inkjet and laser, however they have long produced a range of digital cameras, often nice, sometimes innovative but rarely - until now - world shattering. However for a while a very rough rule of thumb has said £100 per mega pixel and this 5.3 mega pixel offering costs a lot less than the notional £500.

Often manufacturer’s state things like 21x zoom, what they fail to state is that the true zoom is 3x with 7x being digital zoom that only lessens the image size, they multiply the two together to get 21x. The PhotoSmart 945 gives 8x optical and should you wish more then the viewfinder shows the image becoming smaller in the 4x3cm TFT display or viewfinder, using the maximum optical zoom and the maximum digital zoom combined gives you 56x but the image size will then be only .1 mega pixel resolution.

It has an ingenious viewfinder only displays when your eye is close to it, and all the information you need is displayed.

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I took some images at night without flash and while none would win any prizes they were all clearly identifiable. Some of the exposures were more than 20 seconds to use whatever light source was available, a lamp post down the street, a house with a porch light and even light from the moon. The camera does have an excellent flash but there are occasions when a flash is not allowed – Wimbledon Tennis for example - however I would suggest you need something to rest the camera on because even the most non shaky hand will develop shake over 20 seconds. The unit does have a tripod anchor point on the base.

This camera takes excellent automatic images but should your expertise go beyond that the menus allows lots of manual adjustments, these can be set permanently by ticking the item in the menu or more likely just until you turn the camera off and then return to the default.

My tests extended over three weeks and the supplied 4 AA Lithium batteries were more than adequate. You do save power by not using the TFT display to frame images and once taken you can limit the time they are shown on the display.

The rear of the camera has seven buttons an on/off slider and the zoom toggle. The top has the flash release as well as a seven position wheel for the various image modes and this of course includes the ability to take short movies as all decent digital cameras now seem to have.

There are only two resolutions (set by menu) 5 mega pixel (2608x1952) and 1 mega pixel (1296x976), however each resolution has three different compression settings. The display continually tells you how many more images the supplied 32MB Secure Digital card will take at the current settings.

The transfer software is excellent and quick using the supplied USB lead however you can also remove the card from the camera and insert into a card reader should you prefer.

This is an excellent camera for the intermediate user, it is not small at 11x8x7.5cm lens closed but the lens extends another 4cm making the depth 12cm. Certainly to large for a pocket and all but the most cavernous handbag.

If you are looking for a new – non pocket – powerful digital camera then I can only advise you to check out the PhotoSmart 945. I have only scratched the features, the images I took were excellent. I must just mention the Digital Flash feature this has three settings ‘off’ where the image is untouched ‘low’ where dark regions of the images will be slightly brightened and ‘high’ where the adjustment will be greater. I first got an idea of what this can do with a bright sun hidden behind a church tower, lots of light spilled both sides of the tower and thus it appeared in heavy shade in fact nearly black. The same image with ‘low’ produced some definition to the brickwork and tiles. In this extreme example ‘high’ produced the full range. You must try Digital Flash to see what it can do. Another example of this were the images I took at night where the lack of light was enhanced by vastly extended exposures.

The price for this excellent camera is around £345. I have also seen some bundling deals with the top of the range HP 7960 inkjet printer that I will be reviewing soon.

Link : http://h41100.www4.hp.com/uk/eng/consumer/cameras/q2200a.html