Digitize Me (HP Photosmart 735)

Member Name: soamiguy

Product:	HP Photosmart 735
Date:	09/12/05 (117 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: It's a great little workhorse of a camera

Disadvantages: battery life, screen size

I really bought this camera on a whim. Before you start thinking that I'm some kind of posh geezer who can afford to just buy things like digital cameras on the spur of the moment, you should know that I was in the process of getting married, having a baby and buying a house! I bought a camera for 3 reasons - 1: I wanted to be able to document this crazy period in my life (not that it's really calmed down yet!), 2: I needed to buy myself something instead of buying baby grows and cushion covers and 3: The only camera I had until this was a Polaroid which cost about £20 for 10 photos. I had long wanted to join the digital revolution and was happy to see that you could finally get some decent quality hardware for a fairly reasonable price.

One afternoon at work I was surreptitiously surfing the interweb and came across Comet's online store and decided to have a goosy (gander) at their cameras. I was attracted to the small size and general look of the camera and jumped in with my size 9's (American sizes) and buy it then and there! At 3.2 mega pixels, this seemed to be a very good deal as it all came with a handy carry case and a year's manufacturer's guarantee. I declined the offer of extended warranty as I hoped I wouldn't need it, besides I had a house to put a deposit on and a baby to clothe! In total I paid around £150 which was definitely cheap for the time. I didn't bother buying a memory card at the time as the camera has a small amount of hard drive space (16MB) on it and came with a USB lead and software so my theory was that I would be able to dump all my photos on to my pc and just keep deleting the photos as I went.

When it arrived I was very excited. I'm like that every time I order stuff I'm like a kid waiting for Christmas (imagine how I must be at the mo - it nearly IS Christmas!). Anyway, it duly arrived within about 7 days and I could tell that it was going to be pretty small from the outset. I opened the box - still very excited - and was very pleased with what I saw. It is very compact and everything is just where you'd expect it to be and labelled clearly. The camera is (like nearly every other digital camera I've ever seen) grey with different shades of grey highlighting different areas of its shell. It was about this time that my excitement dissipated slightly as I realised it was a grey Monday morning and I had nothing to take a photo of! I had a play anyway (instructions still in the box - obviously). I was impressed with the fact that you could use it as a video recorder (with sound) and tried this out - filming my mums dog walking around a bit. I got bored of this quite quickly so had a look at what else I could do! The camera allows you to choose between 3 levels of quality - handily titled: good, better and best, which makes them easy to distinguish between. If that's not easy enough for you, it also rates them 1-3 stars, 3 being best. Without a memory card in you can store up to - 92 good quality photos, 13 good and 8 best. I can only tell you that best is (obviously) 3.2 mega pixels, I can't find any info on exactly what quality the others are. I always just keep it on best as I don't really see the point of having it on anything else!

I soon realised, though, that 8 photos is just not enough, especially if you are going away for more than an evening at a time. Therefore, I decided to invest in a memory card. This camera, like a lot of portable media items, uses SD memory sticks (think SD stands for san disk - might be wrong though). If you are unsure then the best thing to do is probably just to take your camera with you when you buy it! I bought a 128mb card from Boots for about £50. This gave me (as far as I can remember) 108 pictures in best quality, now we're talking!

The other thing that came with the camera that I have not really used much is the pc software. Obviously I have used some but things like the Hp share to web stuff is beyond what I need. It is very easy to install all of the software, it's all on one disk and pretty much does it all for you. Once set up all you need to do is plug in the USB cable and it will automatically download every photo you've taken since the last time you transferred any pics. This is great as it means that you don't have to go looking for what you have and haven't transferred. It takes only a few seconds to do each photo and they are all placed in your 'my photos' section of you documents, though this can me changed if required.

So, you may have noticed I haven't mentioned anything about the pictures yet! Well, they are very good! I am well aware that you can now buy cameras that have 7+ mega pixel quality but I'm not sure how much better you need a picture to be, especially if, like me, you are just taking family type photo's. I have used the magic Kodak machines in Boots to print out my photos (another reason to have a memory card) and to my untrained eye, there's no discernable difference between one of my photos to an old style photo (by which I mean one that was printed from a film by professional peeps). There is the option to adjust sharpness, saturation and white balance before the photo is taken. I rarely use any of this - I'm a capture the moment kind of guy, I don't go in for all of that 'say this, point there type stuff.
The build quality is excellent in such a cheap camera, I have had it over a yead now and I never take care of my stuff and it looks like new still!

There are other features which I rarely use that you may be interested in knowing about and they are as follows: flash, red eye reduction, 10 second timer, choose from landscape, portrait, action and macro and night mode.

Ok now I realise I have not mentioned anything bad about the camera yet and yet I have not recommended it to potential buyers. Allow me to explain. Or don't, whatever! There are a few minor gripes with the camera, the batteries last about 10 minutes. Ok, that's an exaggeration but it does seem like there is a battery goblin living inside my camera. This would be ok with rechargeable batteries or the docking station (sold separately - despite Ciao's picture) but without it you really do need to have a spare set of the 2 AA's that it takes. To its credit it does turn itself off after about 5 minutes to save on power. My other gripe is that, when I first got it, one of the things that I was most excited about was having the screen to look at and ponce around with. You know what I mean; I wanted to be able to take a photo in a way that said to others - 'I am using a digital camera and I pity you with your analogue pile of crap'. Unfortunately, this was not to be. The screen is fine for reviewing your library of photos, with the option of seeing them one at a time, thumbnails or setting up a slide show. The problems arise when you are taking the photo; it's so blurry and jagged that it's like watching one of the stranger scenes from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas! It's also very small at only 1/5 inches
The last reason I have not recommended it is the fact that, even though it was middle of the range last august, it's now yesterday's news. I would thoroughly recommend the brand - HP have a very good reputation and I have been impressed with the kit as a whole - however, you can get a lot more for your money now. I had a quick look on Comets website (thought this only fair as that's where I bought mine from) and they had several cameras for around £70 - £80 that had bigger screens, more features and were better quality (4 - 6.5 mega pixels). If however you really wanted this one, I looked at EBay and found 2 for sale, one had 3 days left and was at around £25 and one was in Canada with only a few hours left and was going for about £40. It is a great little workhorse of a camera but if you want it you'll need to have a large supply of batteries and be content to use the viewfinder instead of the screen.

Thanks for reading and a merry Crimbo to you all! Rob

Summary: A great little work horse - style and functionality wrapped up in one tidy package

Processing/Quality:
Reliability:
Ease of use:
Features:
Picture quality: