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HP Photosmart R837This sleek digicam packs some industry-first features and a large display but stays slim enough to easily slip into your pocket. Price: $229
By Anthony Losanno 
If you hate the chore of touching up photos every time you upload them to your PC, HP's 7-megapixel Photosmart R837 may be a welcome addition to your weekend. In addition to the standard red-eye reduction mode and some novelties you may never use, the R837 (View Photo Gallery) lets you do things like remove blemishes and fix red-eye without ever loading Photoshop.
At 5.5 ounces and one inch thick, this svelte silver camera is very light to hold and fits easily into your pocket. The slider on the front protects the lens and powers on the camera. The R837's three-inch LCD is very bright (like the HP Photosmart R967's) and fills most of this digicam's rear. Like many point-and-shoots we've recently tested, HP doesn't include an optical viewfinder. The R837 has few buttons, which adds to its clean design. Mode, flash, and shutter buttons, plus a slider to choose among photo, video, and review modes line the top. The other controls are on the right side of the LCD, including the zoom, back, and trash buttons, plus the four-way toggle. The R837 includes 13 scene modes, ranging from Theatre to Sunset. We tried out several of these and were mostly satisfied with the results. While you can adjust the white balance, exposure, and ISO sensitivity, beginners will likely stick with the preprogrammed modes. The R837 makes it very simple to tweak settings and even illustrates what the changes will do to your images. When we bumped up the ISO from 100 to 400, for example, the R837 displayed what each increase would look like on a sample photo. This is a welcome feature for novices who aren't sure how a particular adjustment will affect the shot. In our tests, the R837 produced vibrant images with fairly accurate colors in most conditions. Noise wasn't an issue until we tried to shoot in low light using the Night Portrait setting. In this mode, images looked particularly grainy, likely the result of the R837's max ISO rating of 400. The startup time was fairly speedy, as was the time between shots, except in low-light conditions. HP packages some unique in-camera tweaks to make your images look better, so you don't have to fire up Photoshop when you return home. Entering the Design Gallery gives you the option to remove red eyes, apply artistic effects (like turning your photo into a cartoon), and even correct facial blemishes, slim down subjects, and adjust the eyes of pets, so they don't look like extras from Pet Cemetery. While the Slimming mode has appeared in other HP digicams, the Pet-Eye Fix and Touch Up modes are industry firsts. In a shot of our cats, the Pet-Eye Fix made their eyes appear clear and lifelike, without the eerie glow. This digicam captures decent 24-fps VGA clips with sound. The 3X optical zoom let us get close while filming, and the clarity was surprisingly good for a point and shoot. Our only complaint was that the camera recorded a faint humming sound while zooming in. The HP Photosmart R837 packs a lot of features into a simple, pocket-friendly design at an attractive price. The low-light performance is mediocre, but this is a solid choice for first-time digicam owners or for anyone looking for an easy-to-use point and shoot. View: HP Photosmart R837 Photo Gallery Suggested Stories: Canon PowerShot SD900 Review HP Photosmart R967 Review Multimedia Fun on a Budget HP Photosmart R837 Specifications
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