HP Photosmart R817 review

Thankfully, HP’s learned a few styling lessons since the early days, so you don’t have to hide the badge with your finger any more.

This is good news for the HP PhotoSmart R817: a well-sorted compact that’s nice to handle.

There’s some clever HP technology packed in here, including Adaptive Lighting (lightens up shadows), in-camera red-eye reduction and panorama previews (it stitches low-res versions in the camera).

The control layout’s good, too, and given that a lot of the competition manages only 16MB, the 32MB in-built memory is more than generous.

At 2.0inches and154,000 pixels, the LCD won’t knock your socks off, but the movie mode  (640×480, 30fps ) and 5x optical zoom more than make up for such a minor shortcoming. Our verdict? It’s a keeper.