HP photosmart 318

The HP photosmart is a great first camera you can buy cheap. One of the rare pieces of electronics that works better now than it did a few years ago when it was new.

I have a photosmart 318 camera, it was given to me as a gift in 2002.

When I first got the camera I was not that impressed with it. But lately I have grown to like it more and more.

Now it is to the point where I would recommend it to someone who was interested in purchasing their first digital camera.

When it was new it probably cost $300 a little more with some of the accessories.

The problems were with the batteries and the memory.

On the high setting you can take 7 pictures, on the low setting 113

With the recent developments in batteries and memory chips my old digital camera has some new life.

When I bought the camera three years ago the batteries would last for about 5 pictures, or enough to turn the camera on and off about 5 times.

The batteries were probably 350's they were not rated so I don't know for sure. I purchased some 2200 batteries and was able to use the camera for a entire day on the last trip I took.

I also purchased a new memory chip 256k this gives you a lot of pictures

• 3926 pictures on low
• 558 pictures on medium
• 279 pictures on the high 2.3 meg

So if your thinking about buying a cheap digital camera that has a lot of life left in it, this is a very useful camera.

The major drawback to this camera is that it does not have an optical zoom.

The digital zoom just cuts out part of the picture which you can easily do with any photo program, so that feature is almost worthless.

The digital zoom also cuts your quality by half so you really have no chance of printing any picture that has been enlarged this way.

2.3 megapixels is about what you need to print 4x6 pictures. i would say one in 20 may have some quality issues othen than that the quality is close enough to 35mm that i dont really notice it.

If you want to print pictures larger than 4 by 6 then you need more pixls. the down side is that your pictures will take more space on your memory chip so if you can store 300 at 3 megapixl then you will only get 150 at 6 megapixls the pictures will take twice as ling to copy and to move around

Be careful when you are copying your pictures to your computer, I took some pictures of our wedding and got ready to print them, well the software compressed the pictures and stored them on top of the old full size pictures so it basically converted all my pictures from 3 mp down to less than 1 mp. the end result is that you can look at the pictures on the computer just fine, but when you print them they so grainey they don't look good at all.

features

• built in flash
• compact flash memory slot
• AA batteries
• 2.3 Megapixel