By Ian Burley
21st September - 2001
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Sample images:click here
Hewlett-Packard has unveiled an aggressively priced 3 megapixel digicam today; the Photosmart 715 and we’ve been trying it out at the Eden Project, near St.Austell, Cornwall. Sample images are accessible below.
From next month UK customers will be able to walk away with a 715 for £349 inc.VAT. Only Kodak, as far as we know, can match HP’s price for a 3MP camera, but Kodak’s £349 DX3700 doesn’t have an optical zoom lens, while the HP 715 can boast a 3x (34-102mm equivalent) zoom with a 2x digital extender.
No frills
Let’s get one thing straight the Malaysian-built HP 715 is a no frills camera. Its exposure system is completely automatic - not even backlight compensation or +/- EV override is offered. It only has a single setting of ISO100. It’s also only designed to take AA batteries and rechargeables are not supplied. There is no movie-clip option, nor pre-programmed scene settings.
While genuine enthusiasts won’t like this at all, we suspect that it won’t matter in the slightest to many mass-market customers. All they want is an easy to use camera that can produce good quality pictures most of the time. The 715 would appear to fit this bill from our limited experience with it.
Critical economies avoided
HP has avoided economies were it really matters. The f/2.0-10.0 7-21mm lens looks identical to that we’ve seen on the Epson PhotoPC 3100Z and the Casio QV-4000. In the latter, it’s got the Canon brand emblazened on it. It also looks suspiciously like the Carl Zeiss branded optic used by Sony on its DSC S85, for example... hmm! Close focus or macro mode is retained.
Then there is the 3.3MP CCD sensor giving a maximum image size of 2048x1536 pixels resolution. A sensibly sized 16MB Compact Flash card is included.
Download sample photos
But the proof is in the tasting and we’ve been using the 715 today. Here are some thumbnails linked to full size original copies of images (taken using maximum quality settings) for your perusal. Please note these are over 1MB each and will take at least 5 minutes each to download using a typical dial-up modem connection.
Windows users, right click the thumbnail and select ‘Save Target As...’
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Click here to let us know what you think of the image quality.
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