HP Photosmart M415 Review
Review Date: July 13th 2006
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Ease of Use
The HP Photosmart M415 is made entirely out of plastic, but it does feel solid after the batteries have been inserted. The M415 is supplied with a set of Nimh batteries, which had enough charge in them to last for about a dozen shots before needing to be recharged, meaning the camera could be used straight away. The M415 will fit nicely in a shirt or jacket inside pocket if it is not in a case, but may be a little long for trouser pockets. There are a total of 13 controls on the HP Photosmart M415, including 2 (that's right) shutter release buttons. Looking at the back of the camera, four buttons for Flash, Mode, Self timer and Instant Share run down the left-hand side directly underneath the small viewfinder. To the left of this is the LCD screen. At 130,000 pixels, it's 20,000 more than many other cameras in this kind of price range. Above this are the capture and playback mode buttons, with the capture button doubling up as the monitor on/off switch. At the bottom right is a 4-way D-pad with an OK button in the centre. Above this in a handy circular recess for your thumb and two arc shaped zoom buttons.
On the top of the camera are two shutter buttons. The larger one is the camera shutter, and the smaller one the movie shutter. If it's not obvious, you use the large one to shoot stills, and the smaller one to take movies. It might seem odd at first, but it's a much better way of operating, and it means less wear and tear on the other buttons whenever you shoot a movie. All in all, the layout is extremely well thought out, to make things like changing scene modes, using the self timer, and setting printing options usable without having to wade through the camera's menu system. The M415 is deliciously simple to use. The most common functions, such as selecting the mode, movie taking, flash settings, playback mode, and printing, are accessible without having to resort to the menu. It would have been nice to have a buttons dedicated to image size and Adaptive Lighting, as apart from the options mentioned, these will be the settings that most people use the menus for.
The acid test of a good camera is ease of use, and as most of a digital camera's functions are buried within it's menu system, this is often where a digicam falls down. As stated before, the M415 is very easy to use. In fact top marks go to HP for having one of the easiest menu systems ever. Whilst many functions such as shooting mode, flash and self timer have dedicated buttons, the rest of the cameras features are accessed by the Menu/OK button and the four way joypad. There are 5 menus each with their own subsections. They do not scroll down into one another as menus do on some cameras, which is a good thing as you can't forget which menu you're in. There's a top level menu which allows you to scroll left and right between the five menus. A downward press takes you into that menu, whilst an upward press from the top item takes you back to the top tier. Menu items can be changed in one of two ways: simply pressing left and right scrolls you through the settings for that option and automatically applies it, or if you press the menu button then a sub menu appears and you scroll up or down and have to press �Menu/OK' again to apply the setting. At the bottom of each menu is an exit symbol which exits the whole menu system, but you can also exit it more quickly by pressing the shutter button.
Thankfully, the manual doesn't come on disc as a PDF file, but is supplied as a small A6 sized paperback, amounting to 172 pages. It covers three different M series cameras in the range, the 415, 417 (extra 1x digital zoom, burst mode and 1.8� screen), and the 517 (8x digital zoom, 2� LCD). The manual is very concise and easy to read, and there's a handy index at the back so you can find the information you need quickly. Overall, this is an excellent package of printed material, and could only be bettered by enclosing the paperwork and CD ROM in a wallet like Kodak do with their documentation.
You can use the optical viewfinder or the 1.5 inch LCD screen to compose your shot. It's not a 100% viewfinder, and the actual viewable percentage isn't stated in the manual. Spectacle users may find the viewfinder image slightly blurred at times, and may have to move it around slightly to get a sharp view through it. Otherwise, use the LCD screen as you would a viewfinder for a near 100% preview of what will be captured. The LCD is perfectly usable in daylight conditions, which is more than can be said for many LCD screens, and you can increase the screen's brightness for sunny days.
| Movie Shutter Button / Camera Shutter Button | Flash Button / Mode Button / Self-Timer Button / Instant Share Button |
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The HP Photosmart M415 has a HP Precision 3x zoom lens with a focal length equivalent to 36 mm at wide angle and 108 mm at telephoto. Many digicams only manage 38mm at wide angle, and whilst the extra 2mm means you get a wider view, this is offset by some barrel distortion. At the telephoto end of it's range, 108 mm is a little short, and although many branded cameras only seem to manage 108 mm, 114/115 mm seems to be common as well. One good thing about this lens was at the telephoto end there was no visible pincushion distortion, and the sharpness wasn't compromised at full zoom. Normal focusing is from 50 cm to infinity, and it's macro range is between 10 and 80 cms. It would have been nice to see a 5 cm macro, as many entry level cameras can manage 3cms in super macro mode.
The bane of digital cameras always seems to be the digital zoom. Most are completely unusable after about 1.5 or 1.6 x magnification, and the greater the digital zoom, the more blocky and unusable is the end result. But with a large 6x digital zoom, does the M415 fare any better than most of the competition? Well, surprisingly it does. Whereas most digital zooms crop the image and then add extra pixels to take the image back up to the selected image size, this camera leaves out the latter stage. What this means is that while the image is cropped, there is no interpolation of the image at all. This adds up to smaller photos, and a 5 Megapixel image at full 6x magnification is reduced to 0.1 megapixels in size, but the image doesn't lose any quality at all. When the optical zoom reaches its full extent, with most cameras, digital kicks in, meaning you can often go into digital zoom and lose quality without realising it. With the M415, the zoom stops at full optical zoom, and to initiate the digital one you have to press the zoom button again. Once in digital zoom, a frame shows the area that will be captured and the size in actual megapixels, from 3.9 down to 0.1. There are a number of pre-set image sizes, with more that one size for each of the smaller resolution settings. This can be utilised to great effect. If you normally shoot at 3 megapixels, if you switch to 5 and utilise the digital zoom as well, the camera crops the image down to 3, and the resultant image will be zoomed in closer without compromising much image quality. Obviously, some quality loss will be inevitable, but it's negligible.
Have you ever taken a shot with the flash set to auto instead of red eye? Or have you taken a photo and noticed that the shadow detail is too dark? Well, to combat these problems, HP have developed what it calls �Real Life Technologies'. This is basically on-camera post processing, a bit like an imaging program on your PC. On the M-series HP cameras there are two of these technologies, �Adaptive lighting' and �Red Eye Removal'. But do they actually work?
Adaptive lighting is basically a digital flash. It intelligently lightens the darker areas of a photo to bring out detail that would normally be lost. HP's Image Zone Express software, downloadable from the HP website, features a software version of this that works well on dark photographs, but introduces a lot of speckly noise (as opposed to graininess). Adaptive Lighting is a much more subtle version which, when selected, performs this task in-camera after the image has been captured. The more expensive HP cameras have two levels, Low and High, but the M415 only has an On/Off setting. When activated, an icon appears on the LCD screen so you know it's on. Adaptive Lighting does bring out the shadow detail that is normally lost, but does so at the expense of added noise. Also the sample images from HP models with high and low settings seem to bring out much more detail, and lighten the darker areas much more effectively. Perhaps the high setting was dropped from the M415 because it would have made the images far too noisy. Compared to other 5 MP cameras, the M415 seems to lose more shadow detail and the bottom line is that while Adaptive Lighting does work to a degree, a high setting would have been a welcome addition.
| Zoom Lever | Navigation D-Pad |
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Red-eye has been the bane of photographers ever since built in flashes were introduced into cameras in the 1970's, and digicams are no exception to this. When it does occur, it's a cumbersome process removing it in Photoshop Elements or Paint Shop Pro. Here's where the in-camera removal tool comes into its own. After the image has been taken, selecting the Red Eye tool in the playback menu will instantly process the image and find any red eyes. After processing is complete, if red eyes are present, little squares appear around the eyes. If none are present, then the display will tell you so. The camera does an excellent job of selecting the offending red eyes. Even in an image where three out of four subjects contained red eyes of varying degrees (one was vivid, two were much more subtle), the camera perfectly selected the offending areas. Once red eyes have been selected, you simply press OK, and are presented with the option to preview the image, accept the changes or discard them. Any changes made are saved to the same file, though it would have been nice to have had the option of saving as a separate file. This feature works really well - the only real drawback is that on the M415 the corrected eyes may appear black. Also, sometimes small red objects are recognised as eyes and the red is removed from them as well. It must be noted that the correction did not exceed the area covered by the eyes, as can happen when using an image editor to do it. Whilst experts will probably get better results with Photoshop or PSP, the average snapper will find this tool invaluable at removing red eye.
The camera is powered on by sliding the power on switch to the right and holding there for a few seconds. The green power light comes on to indicate the camera is powered on. With a start-up time of around three seconds from switching on through the lens extending and getting the ready to shoot bleep, it's not a fast camera (at this price it was never intended to be), nor is it a slouch. In fact it's just about average for an entry level point and shoot. Shutter lag when pre-focused is under one second, and when having to focus before taking the shot, there is hardly any difference. Write times for a 3 MP image are somewhat longer than you might expect, yet a 5 MP image didn't take much longer. The HP M415 generally seems to focus well outdoors. It must be noted that for indoor shots with lighting on (be it tungsten or fluorescent) it was sometimes inclined not to focus properly before taking the shot, or indeed give a message that it's unable to take the picture. Sometimes, this was cleared after focusing several times, other times not. In these instances, it seemed that the lens was zoomed in too much, as zooming out often enabled the picture to be taken or lock on and gain a proper focus. This happens enough times for it to become annoying and be a minor concern.
Once you have captured a photo, the HP Photosmart M415 is quite good when it comes to playing, reviewing and managing your images. You can scroll through the images that you have taken, view thumbnails, zoom in and out, add an audio clip to each image, delete an image and rotate an image. There are also a couple of playback features that I haven't seen before on other digital cameras. A menu option called Remove Red Eyes does exactly what it says (although the process does take about 15 seconds). Another unique playback feature is Undelete Last, which restores the last photo that you deleted - handy if you have accidentally deleted something that you really wanted to keep. Through HP's Instant Share feature, you can designate images to be automatically sent to a particular location, like email or an online photo album, when you download them.
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