HP Photosmart 320

The HP Photosmart 320 is a straightforward digital camera which is easy to use. However, it isn't immediately rechargeable, its picture quality is not that great and it lacks flexibility.

User-Friendly
The Photosmart 320 is a 2.1-megapixel model, with three easily selectable quality settings. These show up as user-friendly one, two or three star options. The interface, in general, is simple, fast and practical to use. One switch toggles the LCD screen on and off. One switch toggles between camera and picture review modes. Quality and digital zoom modes are also controlled by simple buttons.

The Photosmart features a simple optical viewfinder as well as a color LCD display. It has three digital zoom modes up to 4x, but the new field of view doesn't fill the entire screen--it is shown as a small rectangle over the picture, indicating the portion which comprise the new picture. This makes it rather difficult to frame the shot, especially since the resolution of the LCD screen is not that great in the first place.

Limited Shooting Capabilities
At its lowest quality setting, the Photosmart 320 created pretty awful compression artifacts, especially in night-time photos. However, at the better quality settings, this all but disappeared. We found that the flash lacks range and the sensitivity to brightness was not particularly good.

The Photosmart 320 features a video clip feature--we found it overly short and extremely vulnerable to blurring. To get good results with this, you need to ideally mount the Photosmart 320 on a tripod and shoot with only a small number of moving elements in the frame. We found that if the camera angle changes, immense streaks and blurring distort the view for as long as the camera is in motion.

Expandable Storage
The Photosmart 320 comes with 8MB of storage space, which equates to 50 shots at the lowest detail setting. It has an SD memory card slot, which allows for expansion if you want to purchase a separate SD card. There is an easy option to immediately delete shots taken within a certain time frame of two or three seconds. However after this time has elapsed, getting into the menu where you can interactively delete photos is a painful process.

Thankfully, installation of the PC software for the Photosmart 320 is fast, straightforward and requires a minimum of interaction. It tends to just dump the entire contents into a directory and clear the camera memory, which is fine for most situations. We did have to hunt around a little to discover exactly where on the hard disk pictures were being stored.

Prints Directly Off HP Printers
Like most of the other cameras in the Photosmart range, the Photosmart 320 has direct printing capability to HP's USB-enabled Photosmart or Deskjet printers.

Standard AA batteries are supplied, which puts the same limitations on the Photosmart 320 as we observed with the 620. If you want one-step recharging, you'll need to invest in HP's digital camera dock and AC Adapter, which puts the price of the Photosmart 320 up considerably.

Overall we found the Photosmart 320 to be a robust, functional and easy-to-use camera. It just won't impress photography purists or those looking for a high quality film camera replacement.

Editor's note: The HP Photosmart 320 camera is currently only available in Korea and Australia.

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