Pros: Great starter digital, awesome pics, price, able to view pics after taking.
Cons: Eats batteries and sometimes slow to "warm up".
The Bottom Line: For a beginner digital user, this camera has been a positive experience. Don't feel the need to move on to anything else. Great product for the price.
rocoboko's Full Review: Hewlett Packard Photosmart 215 Digital Camera
I am an addict of two websites, you are on one of them right now and my other addiction is ebay, which eventually necessitated the purchase of a digital camera since I had run out of things to sell that would fit on my scanner. This is the third try with a digital camera and as the old saying goes ... "three's a charm" and this one is a keeper.
This camera includes the following features:
*1.31 MP resolution
*2x digital zoom
*1.8-inch color LCD
*auto flash, auto focus and exposure and self timer
*USB interface
This camera includes the following items with purchase:
*wrist strap
*4 AA batteries
*USB cable
*user guide
*CD with HP Photo Imaging Software
This camera will need the following system requirements:
*166 MHz
*32 MB RAM
*180 MB free disk space
*CD-ROM
*USB interface
*Windows 2000 Professional, Me or 98 (compatible with Windows XP)
Now before any electronics experts blast me out of cyberspace because of my apparent lack of technical descriptions, this review is really for the digital camera lay person...such as I. So from someone who stumbles and fumbles as I learn to such a kindred spirit...this is for you!
I love this little camera. I read through the instruction booklet and played with all the different features. It came with what I assume is the smallest memory card, so I appreciated the fact that I didn't have to purchase that in addition to the camera. You can, however, purchase larger memory cards, but the card that came with this camera suits our needs very well.
As I stated earlier, this was purchased for me to take pics of items I am selling on ebay. But it has turned into quite the family camera and we use it all the time for many occasions. The only thing I don't do is take it on trips because we never purchased a larger memory card, so the card we have would fill up to quick.
You are allowed to choose one of three resolutions for taking pics. The higher the resolution you choose, the fewer pics your memory card will hold. I have used all three resolutions with excellent results.
It took me a little while to get a "feel" for this camera. One of the cons is that unlike a conventional film camera, you can't just grab and click. It needs a few seconds to "warm-up". But that's really not an issue for us.
The software that was included is wonderful and very user friendly. It has a feature called a "slide show" that we use more than anything else. I have loaded and scanned images in and then sorted in a folder and all you have to do is click "slide show" and all the images in the folder will go from one image to the next (kinda like a slide projector) until you stop it. This is a great feature when we have open house at Christmas and we can have a slide show of the years activities going. Folks get a big kick out of it. The cable that is included is VERY easy to hook up to the pc and the camera and uploading images is as easy as a couple of clicks!
Another con, though again, not an issue for us is that this camera seems to eat batteries. We get around this problem by removing the batteries when the camera is not in use. This is also an advantage because we have forgotten to turn the camera off on several occasions and killed 4 brand new batteries in no time at all.
It takes equally good pics indoors and out, but the LCD is sometimes hard to view when out in the sun. Stepping into the shade eliminates that problem.
So all in all, we are very pleased with this camera. We certainly could have paid much more for a camera with more features or paid less for a camera with less features, but this seemed to be a suitable "middle ground" camera that suits our needs.
This was our third try at a digital, the first two didn't work out for various reasons, but the feature that sold this for us was the ability to view the picture you just took and being able to delete it immediately if you cut someone's head off or your subject is looking the wrong way. The red eye reduction feature is also a plus, as is the self timer for gatherings when you want everyone in the pic.
We use this on a computer with Windows XP and it works very well with no gliches what-so-ever.
So, as with many other HP products, we have again found customer satisfaction and know we will get many years of quality usage from this product.
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