CNET editors' review
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CNET editors' rating:
stars
Good
Detailed editors' rating
- Reviewed on: 10/25/2007
The M537's simple, unassuming design has few controls and is extremely easy to use. Its chunky plastic body holds only a handful of large, easily pressed buttons on its back, arranged sparsely around the camera's screen. The camera's menu system is as simple as its interface and offers few shooting options. Once you take your pictures, though, you can use the comfortable directional pad to tap through the various in-camera editing features.
HP designed the M537 to be an affordable budget camera. Its 6-megapixel sensor, 3x optical zoom lens, and 2.5-inch LCD all fit into the mold of an extremely cookie-cutter snapshot camera. Of course, for the price, that's not a terrible thing. Like all HP Photosmart cameras, the M537 features a generous amount of onboard software features that help make up for the camera's unimpressive hardware. HP's Steady Photo antishake feature boosts ISO sensitivity to force a fast shutter speed in order to reduce blur in photos. It's not as effective as either mechanical or optical image stabilization, especially since higher ISOs bring with them noisier images, but it can help in certain situations. An onboard red-eye removal function can edit the red dots out of flash-afflicted eyes without the machine-gun burst of flashes some red-eye reduction features use. Finally, HP's Design Gallery offers a handful of in-camera editing and tweaking functions, though they're much more artistic than useful. It also has a movie mode, but it records only QVGA (320x240) clips at 24 frames per second (fps) compared to most cameras' 30 fps VGA movie modes. The M537 doesn't accept SDHC cards, either, so your choice of storage is limited to 2GB or smaller SD cards.
With no manual white balance, ISO sensitivity, or even exposure controls, the M537 offers few options beyond a small handful of scene presets. It automates the entire shooting process, so it functions as a true "point-and-shoot." This puts the M537 on very similar footing with Olympus' FE-series, another set of almost completely automated budget shooters.
The M537 showed sluggish results in our tests. The camera took an arduously long 4.1 seconds to start up and capture its first image. Shutter lag measured 1.1 seconds in our high-contrast test and a full 2 seconds in a low-contrast test, which mimic bright and dim shooting conditions, respectively. The camera took 2 seconds between shots, a wait that jumped to 3.2 seconds with the onboard flash enabled. Only its burst mode showed impressive results for a camera in its price range, yielding full-resolution JPEGs at an average rate of 2.1fps.
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