HP Photosmart M305 3.2MP Digital Camera with 3x Optical Zoom

Rating:
Summary: The Price is Right
Review: I am by no means a professional photographer, but I have a lot of experince with digital video processing and imagery. I wanted a digital camera that possessed macro photography potential and an optical zoom - digital zoom is useless on everything I have seen.

This camera was bought for $125, and for the price, performs fairly well. I have uploaded several photos to the image gallery so that you can judge the quality for yourself.

I am somewhat dissapointed in the overall quality of the photos from this camera. The JPEG compression is extreme, and although the camera lives at it's highest setting, 3MPBest, the compression is too aggressive. When editing in an image program, pixelization is quite apparent, and a 3.2MP high resolution picture gets compressed into a 1.2MP file. As a result, a busy scene contains numerous JPEG artifacts.

The Macro results are somewhat better. You may get as close as 4 inches to a subject - so it's not truly a MACRO lens, but it beats a minimum focal length of 22 inches.

Overall, this is a good camera for a beginner and the price is quite competitive for a camera with this feature set.

For anyone other than Grandma and the absolute beginner, the included .NET framework software (HP Image Zone 4) is total crap, and would best be avoided. It installs 5 or 6 processes at boot-time, and makes starting the computer take longer than necessary. If you use Windows XP / Server 2003, I would simply use the built in PTP protocol image downloader. In Windows 2000, set up the camera as a removable disk drive and copy the files from there.

HP should take note of this objection, and include the option for only installing the image downloader as opposed to installing a group of cheesy programs like Greeting Card Makers, Half-Assed image editors, and Web-Based image sharing apps. Every product in the HP line, including the $600 cameras, comes with this same software, and I believe they are hurting sales as many companies will shy away from sending, for instance, an insurance investigator or agent into the field with a camera that is supported with software that requires the installation of this sort of nonsense.


Rating:
Summary: A Good Camera, But It Could Be Better
Review: I recieved this camera for Christmas and I am really pleased with it. I especially like the the size of the camera since I travel alot and often bring it with me. I also like the the black and white, and sepia modes for taking pictures and the movie mode as well. The camera is very easy to use and I was able to figure out how to work most of its features without consulting the directions.

However, there are some things I was disappointed about, especially the picture quality. In the description it says the camera has 3.2 mp but I think the quality is lower than that. I also don't like that you can't listen to the audio on video clips without hooking it up to the computer. I also can't find a way to copy the pictures from the camera to the computer without copying all the pictures on the card as opposed to one or two. You might be able to but I haven't found a way.

Other than that though I love my camera and it is a good buy for the low price. It's perfect for carrying around and taking pictures to share online and and printing photos at home.

Rating:
Summary: Horrific picture quality
Review: I was looking for a cheap, low end digital camera with optical zoom and 3MP, this was it, the m305. Let's start with the bad, then move on to the good.

The bad, for a 3.2MP digital camera, it has HORRIBLE picture quality, the 3.2MP image looks more like a 1.2MP image, the photo quality has a ridiculous amount of JPEG artifact, and the photos are not sharp at all. By the way, I've set the camera at the highest quality mode "3MP Best"

Despite setting the image quality to it's highest setting (which means it's the least amount of compression you can choose), too large an amount of JPEG compression has been applied to the image, which is part of the reason why image quality is so bad on this camera.
(The uncompression 3.2MP image size is around 9MB, but the camera compresses it to around 1.4MB, which causes it the image to lose a lot of detail, and causes rough edges and blurriness. If only you can choose a lower amount of compression, I'm sure the image would look much better)

Bottom line on picture quality: 3.2MP shot looks like a 1MP shot. (I've gotten get better picture quality when selecting 1MP than the 3.2MP, much sharper edges, less JPEG artifacts)

The Good: I got mine for really cheap $60(After rebates at staples, $67AR if you include the cost of tax), and $70 is a really good price for a digital camera with an 3x optical zoom.

Summary:
Inexpensive camera (if bought for $80 or lower), easy to use, 3x optical zoom (digital zoom is useless), but photo quality is similar to a 1MP image.

Rating:
Summary: hp m305- great beginner camera
Review: This camera is small enough to carry in a purse while still being able to take quality photos! I love the size of it and the larger 1.8" LCD screen- most cameras this small only have 1.5" LCDs! It has an awesome 3x optical zoom and a digital zoom you can use if you are already using the maximum optical zoom. One of my favorite features of this camera is being able to take photos in sepia and black and white!

My only complaints are they say this camera has a movie mode with sound, but it has a microphone and no speakers, so you can only listen to the audio of your movie if you connect it to the computer using the included software- it comes with HP Instant Share software that has good editing tools and effects. While in movie mode you cannot use the zoom either. I also wish this camera came with a camera case to store it in so the LCD would not get scratched.

Overall this is a 4 star camera, I don't give it 5 stars because of the movie sound/zoom issue. It's a good buy for the price!!!