HP Photosmart R717

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Product Summary

Good

6.2

out of 10

The good: Well-conceived design; easy-to-master controls and menus; solid panorama and macro modes.

The bad: Subpar performance in nearly every area; weak flash; somewhat noisy images.

The bottom line: Despite some redeeming qualities, the R717 earns demerits for its subpar performance.

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CNET Asia Review

By Staff,Robert Dubbin
May 9, 2005

It has a well-conceived design, a few interesting features, and decent image quality, but the one thing that the 6.2-megapixel HP Photosmart R717 has in spades is a crippling case of sloth. We're talking performance that makes you feel like you're operating in bullet-time, like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix, without the benefits of superhuman reflexes or the ability to fly. But despite some redeeming qualities--a menu and control layout that are easy for even novices to master, an effective panorama mode, and a very good macro setting that yields sharp results--the R717's subpar performance makes us hestitant to recommend it unreservedly.

The 210g R717 is a nice-looking camera, with a pleasingly curvy design, a brushed-metal front, and an easy-to-grip rear surface. The 1.8-inch LCD screen isn't terribly large, but it's more than bright enough to read and can be adjusted to a lower setting to save on battery life. The buttons are nicely laid out on the rear right side of the camera; the only control not in immediate reach of your right thumb is the Shooting Mode button, located to the left of the R717's top panel. The included optical viewfinder provides decent coverage of your frame, though if you're zoomed all the way out, a piece of the camera's lens is visible in the lower-right corner of the window. HP deserves kudos for its extremely well-designed menu and user interface; clicking OK on any menu function pulls up a detailed explanation of what to expect at every setting of each included feature. Furthermore, the menu's uncomplicated layout makes it an engaging, educational tool for anyone just getting their feet wet in digital photography.

There's a comfortable array of features included with the camera, the most highly touted of which are HP's Real Life technologies. Those include in-camera red-eye removal, a well-executed panorama-assist function, and HP's own adaptive lighting technology for correcting underexposed areas of high-contrast or backlit shots. Unfortunately, even when our test subjects' red-eye was plainly visible, the R717's removal function failed to locate the problem, let alone fix it. In fact, we ran out of patience, having taken about a dozen red-eyed shots in various conditions, before we could get it to work even once. The panorama-assist function, on the other hand, delivered excellent results; you can stitch anywhere from two to five pictures together, and the R717 did a great job of both keeping our shots on a level plane and then showing us an onscreen preview of what the final panorama would look like. Other notable features include a limited aperture-priority mode that switches between f/2.8 and f/4.8, and HP's Instant Share function, which allows you to tag images with e-mail addresses for easy delivery once they're uploaded to your computer.

Unfortunately, the R717's subpar performance is a real deal breaker. The guy in the HP commercials who instantly creates photos of himself by pulling picture frames over his head does so with a seamless frequency that most certainly does not apply to this camera. The R717 posted first-shot, shot-to-shot, and shutter-lag times so poor as to make it impossible to recommend to anyone concerned with capturing such capricious subjects as sporting events, children, or pets. It took an average of 4.5 seconds to take our first shot after powering up the camera; as a practical matter, any subject that isn't rooted to the ground will probably have moved on by the time 4.5 seconds pass. The R717 posted a similarly anemic shot-to-shot time of 3.4 seconds, though that figure improved to a more respectable 3.7 seconds with flash enabled.

In burst mode, the HP Photosmart R717 can grab three full-resolution images in just under a second--0.9 second, to be precise--though processing the images will tie up the camera for a bit afterward. That's quick, but most point-and-shoots with burst modes can grab more than just three images; you'll have to choose whether speed or quantity is more important to you. Nothing quite prepared us for what we found when we tested the R717's shutter lag. Because the camera's autofocus-assist beam can only be set to auto and lacks an Always-On setting, we actually recorded faster shutter-lag times under dim conditions (0.8 second) than we did under bright ones (1.3 seconds). If you're trying to frame a running child or a playful puppy, 1.3 seconds is an eternity; you'll either need an extraordinary sense of timing or some lethargic children to get anything better than a trailing foot in your shot. Last, and possibly least, the R717's flash functioned poorly in our image-quality tests, demonstrating below-average range by failing even to reach the test scene.

The R717's image quality was inconsistent. The camera has a very good macro mode that gave us sharp details in close-up shots but also took somewhat noisy pictures when we bumped the sensitivity up to ISO 100. The noise problem was exacerbated when we turned on HP's Adaptive Lighting feature; though we definitely saw improved exposures in what had been darkened sections of our photos, the trade-off came in the form of increased noise in those areas. We also noticed some chromatic aberration in our test shots, with buildings and trees taking on the occasional green-tinted border. The high quality of our macro images was an especially pleasant surprise given the overall softness of many of our longer shots, even when we switched to infinite focus. But for anyone planning to do lots of close-up work, the HP Photosmart R717 seems well suited to that particular task.