HP PhotoSmart 812xi review

Not quite right this instant
The benefits of HP's Instant Share system are somewhat offset by the PhotoSmart 812's--at best--middling performance. The camera's optical viewfinder is fairly big and bright, but its 1.5-inch LCD is frustratingly hard to see in daylight. The autofocus system is slow, and when you press the shutter-release button, the view in the LCD freezes on a single frame until the focus finally locks. That annoyed us when we were shooting stationary subjects and made capturing moving subjects a maddening trial. The rest of the camera's performance rises almost to the level of average, with a six-second start-up time, a six-second shot-to-shot time, and several hours of shooting on a single battery charge.

Pleasing pictures
Test pictures from the PhotoSmart 812 were perfectly acceptable, although they weren't as detailed as those from this camera's best 4-megapixel competitors and showed some compression artifacts when viewed at full size. Colors were reasonably accurate and very vivid, though sometimes so vivid that they looked a little garish. The automatic white balance and exposure systems performed well, giving us good results in most of our shots. Predictable exceptions included backlit scenes, which were often underexposed, and some indoor shots under incandescent lighting, which had an amber color cast.