HP Photosmart M307

The Photosmart M307 is small. It may not be as tiny as some of the more expensive digital cameras, but it's certainly slimmer than average. It's also more stylishly curved than most of its competitors but, being from HP, has the fairly sturdy build quality that you would expect.

It's easy to use, with a slider to switch it on and off, and just two buttons on the top, one to take a picture and one to control the movie capture feature.

The rest of the buttons are located on the back panel, along with a small screen. It's clear what each button does, though it is unusual to use buttons rather than switches to toggle between taking pictures and viewing them. The menus are clear and concise, and even include hints and tips for using the camera and taking better pictures.

The M307 is a 3-megapixel camera, which means it should be able to print large pictures - bigger than an A4 sheet of paper - without them becoming distorted. In practice, the results from the camera were good, but were not without their flaws.

On a 6 x 4in print the image looked very good, but at larger sizes there were problems with consistency of tone over large patches of colour, and problems where the edges of objects met. However, the M307 is certainly not the first budget camera to fall victim to this slight flaw.

The 15x digital zoom sounds impressive but in practice you're far better using the 3x optical zoom. Digital zoom uses software to 'add' missing image information to a picture, which generally results in a slightly pixelated and lower quality image. Optical zoom, however, is a direct representation, with no loss in image quality whatsoever. Like most modern digital cameras, the M307 includes a macro mode for shooting close-ups.

It connects to the computer via the supplied USB cable, and doing so will fire up the appropriate Windows XP wizard for transferring your pictures. Unlike some cameras, the M307 is actually recognised as a camera rather than some sort of disk drive, so you can get at the images without having to wade through folders.

Overall, it's a very reasonable camera that looks good and will give you good results for its price range, although anyone looking to print large images may be better advised to look at a higher-end model.

Contact: HP 0870 010 4320
www.hp.com/uk

Also consider: Fujifilm FinePix A120