Hewlett Packard HP 945

Note that this review was written based on a pre-production model. While the hardware isn't likely to change before release, it's possible there may be software based changes before retail models hit the shelves, so this review should be taken as a preliminary look at the camera rather than the last word on performance. HP requested that full size images from the camera NOT be included in this review since the camera was a prototype. We hope to be able to add such images as soon as a final production version becomes available for testing.

The HP 945 is a logical development of the HP 850 which was introduced in September 2002. The lens seems to be the same (37-300mm) but the pixel count has been increased from 4MP to 5MP, a number of new features have been added and no doubt the software has been improved, probably borrowing from the advances made with the HP 940 (5MP with a 37-111mm lens). A full list of camera specs and a comparison with the HP 850 can be found here, but the major features which are new on the HP945 are:

• 5MP sensor
• ISO 400 capability
• Manual Focus Option
• Burst Mode (at ~ 1.6 frames/second)
• 150x zoom for playback images
• Black finish
• Control over sharpness, contrast and saturation
• Exposure compensation in 1/3 stop steps (vs. 1/2 stops on the HP 850)
• Custom function to retain selected camera settings when camera is turned off.

Main features common to both the 850 and 945 are:

• 8x optical zoom (37-300mm equivalent)
• 7x digital zoom
• Aperture and shutter priority modes as well as program modes
• SD/MMC memory
• Video mode
• Sound recording
• Direct printing when camera is attached to certain HP printers
• USB 1.1 interface
• 4 x AA battery power source

Again, a full list of features and technical specs is available on the " Technical Specifications" page

All cameras have to be judged on the basis of their market niche. The HP945 is aimed squarely at the consumer who wants a 5MP digicam with a wide range zoom. There aren't too many other cameras in this class. The closest is probably the Nikon Coolpix 5700 (35-280mm), which has a street price in the $900-$1000 range, probably almost double what the HP945 will sell for. Other cameras with fairly wide range zooms are the Minolta 7 series (28-200mm), the Sony F717 (38-190mm).  The Olympus C-750 UZ has a wider range zoom (38-380mm), but only a 4MP sensor. The HP945 has the lowest list price of all these cameras, and will almost certainly have the lowest street price (below $550), so it's an obvious choice for the cost conscious consumer to put on their short list of wide range zoom digicams.

The HP945 doesn't try to follow the current trend of making digicams that are so small you will loose them, or at least attempt put them on your keyring! However it packs a 37-300mm zoom and I don't think we'll ever see a shirt pocket camera with a lens like that! The body measures about 4.5" wide by 3" high by 2" wide and the lens housing (retracted) adds about another inch to the width. When turned on the lens extends another 1.5", but the length remains fixed when the lens is zoomed. The HP945 fits the hand quite well with a rounded grip on the right hand side of the camera. The shutter release falls nicely under your index finger while your thumb rests on the zoom lens control. On the upper left side of the camera is the electronic viewfinder with adjustable diopter. The view is clear and by being on the left edge of the camera, your nose doesn't hit the LCD screen as it does on some DSLRs!

A detailed look

Viewfinder and LCD

The HP945 does not have an optical viewfinder. Both the LCD screen and viewfinder image are electronic. An LCD viewfinder image has pluses and minuses. On the plus side it shows exactly what you are looking at, in color, with shooting data superimposed. On the minus side it's not as clear as an optical viewfinder and it doesn't operate in real time (the image moves in discrete jerks if you pan). With an 8x zoom ratio it would be quite difficult to make an optical viewfinder so there probably wasn't much of a choice to be made here. The viewfinder LCD is supposed to turn on (and the main LCD turn off) when you put your eye to the viewfinder. I found that thus usually (but not always) worked with the camera held horizontally, but rarely (if ever) worked with the camera held vertically. Luckily there are two ways around this. The first is to place your left thumb over the sensor which controls the switching (right below the eyepiece). The second is to select manual viewfinder mode in which you can switch between the main LCD and viewfinder LCD by pressing one of the control buttons on the rear of the camera. Note that the camera tested was a pre-production model, so it's possible the eye control of the viewfinder will be more reliable in production models. The electronic viewfinder has an adjustable diopter eyepiece and is bright and clear. The full LCD is excellent indoors and acceptable outdoors. The brightness is adjustable, but the "outdoor" setting just seemed to lower the contrast without actually making the display brighter. I found the "indoor" setting easier to see, even outdoors!

Flash (and pseudo flash)

Flash must be manually selected, but once it is popped up, it's operation is automatic (if you have that set as an option). This is good, since the flash never fires when you don't want it to. If you don't pop it up, there's no danger of it firing no matter what mode you are in. It seems to work quite well. Exposure and color balance are good. There are the usual modes, with and without red-eye, including slow sync. There's also a "digital flash" mode. I couldn't quite figure out what this was until it dawned on me that it wasn't actually a flash mode at all! It's a software emulation of fill flash and what it does is apply corrections to the digital image to make the darker parts somewhat lighter. Clearly this is of marginal use if you do post processing of your images, but I suppose if you print directly from the camera it may be useful.

In a note from HP they pointed out that the "digital flash" operates on the full 36-bit data output from the sensor. If you post process you only have the reduced 24-bit data present in the saved JPEG to work with, so "digital flash" processing in camera does have a real advantage

Color, B&W and Sepia

You can select normal color mode, a B&W mode and a Sepia mode. The nice thing here is that the LCD shows these effects so you can see how your B&W shots will look. B&W (and Sepia) is another mode that isn't much use if you post process your images on a PC. You'll have more control if you shoot in color and convert in PhotoShop. However it's nice to be able to get some idea of what an image will look like in B&W (then switch back to color for shooting) and if you're printing directly from the camera, the B&W and Sepia options could be useful.

White balance

There are several white balance modes: Auto; Sun; Shade; Tungsten; Fluorescent and Manual. Most of the time you can just leave the setting at "auto" and the camera will do a very good job of color balancing. Fluorescent lighting gives it most problems and that isn't at all surprising since fluorescent lights come in so many different type with different spectral outputs - and the output of many of this is discontinuous, meaning there are "spikes" or color (mostly green) which are very difficult to deal with. Nevertheless testing under screw-in fluorescent replacements for tungsten bulbs, color balance was very neutral on the auto setting. Sun, shade and tungsten settings can be used to fix the color balance, which may be useful for a series of shots or if your subject is, say, all one color, which can give auto systems a hard time. Manual color balance is useful under mixed or other difficult lighting conditions and should give the best results if other settings don't look quite right.

Metering

There are three metering modes, Average - which averages across the whole frame, Center-weighted - which gives more weight to objects in the center of the image but also takes the edges into account, and Spot which determines exposure based only on on whatever is in center of the image. There is no "multi-zone" metering option. In general metering seems pretty accurate. Exposure compensation is available in 1/3 stop steps up to a maximum of +/- 3 stops.

Zoom, zoom and more zoom

The lens is an 8x "zoom", equivalent to about a 37-300 lens on a full frame 35mm slr. I put "zoom" in quotes because like many lenses on digicams it appears to have discrete zooming steps. I counted 13 steps from 37mm to 300mm. After you're at 300mm, holding down the zoom button engages "digital zoom", which basically just crops the image. The LCD actually shows the crop rather than the enlarged image, which is a good (and non-misleading) way to do this. Again, digital zoom isn't a very useful function if you post process your images on a PC, but could be of use if printing directly from the camera.

Playback and playback zoom

Unlike some digicams. the HP945 doesn't have a separate playback mode. If you hit the playback button while in the normal shooting mode, you can recall images. However shooting mode always has priority, so if you're in the middle of reviewing your images and an alien spaceship swoops overhead, you can point and shoot without having to switch from playback to shooting mode.

Playback zoom is amazing! You can blow up an image by a factor of 150x. At this level of expansion you can count the individual pixels. I'm not quite sure why you'd want to do this, but it's a neat feature and there's certainly no way anyone could ever complain that playback zoom isn't powerful enough! The only slight disappointment here is that recalling an image for playback zoom takes about 5-6 seconds, presumably this time is required to read the image data from the memory card into the camera. It's not really a big deal but the lag is noticeable and could get annoying if you wanted to review a lot of images at high magnification.

Focus

Autofocus works well, if not blindingly fast. Focus speed depends on how much focus change is needed, but, for example, going from close focus to infinity at 300mm takes about 1.5 seconds. AF time is shorter if less change in focus distance is needed, but is still at least about 0.5s. There is one AF zone, in the center of the frame, and it seems accurate and reliable. It light sup in green if focus has been achieved. There's also an infinity range which the manual says "limits focus to a small region near infinity". I suppose this could speed up AF somewhat and could be useful if shooting past nearer objects which are close to the AF zone. The macro focus setting is used for objects closer than 80cm (31.5"). There is also a manual focus setting, which can act as a focus lock. If  you focus in auto, then switch to manual, the focus distance remains unchanged. Unless there is a real reason to use manual focus, autofocus is probably better as it's pretty hard to judge exact focus from the LCD display..

Shutter Lag and other timing issues

Shutter lag is somewhat difficult to measure, but if you prefocus and hold the shutter 1/2 depressed, the lag between fully depressing the shutter and the shot being taken seems very short - not noticeably different than a typical consumer SLR. This probably means a lag somewhere between 0.1 and 0.2 seconds.

The camera is a little slow to turn on initially since the lens has to be extended before operation can start. From first hitting the "on" switch to actually obtaining an image took just under 5 seconds (4.9s). This includes time for the lens to extend, time for the camera software to boot, time for autofocus and autoexpose plus any shutter lag.

Image saving is pretty slow. It takes about 12-14 seconds to save an image, which is a long time these days. However since there is a decent sized buffer in the camera you don't have to wait for one image to be saved before shooting the next. You won't run into any problems from the slow saving unless you shoot fast enough to fill the buffer (which seems to be capable of holding about 6 frames at maximum resolution and minimum compression). If you turn the camera off during a save operation you do not lose the image. The save completes, then the camera shuts down.

Exposure Modes

There is a full auto mode in which the camera selects both shutter speed and aperture (and ISO speed if set to auto). It seems to be somewhat biased towards large aperture and fast shutter speeds, probably because most users won't be using the camera on a tripod, so faster shutter speeds should give sharper images. In addition to full auto there are three programmed auto modes: Action bias the exposure towards even faster shutter speeds and higher ISO settings in order to stop action, Landscape biases exposure to smaller apertures and lower ISO settings in order to maximize depth of field and image quality and Portrait which biases the exposure towards larger apertures to blur the background (though this is pretty difficult with all small sensor digicams). There is also the option of Aperture Priority or Shutter Priority exposure, but there is no fully manual mode where you can set both aperture and shutter speed.

There is no specific "Night" mode, though exposures as long as 16 seconds can be made and noise reduction kicks in for long exposures. Noise reduction works by shooting a blank frame right after the exposure, then subtracting the noise in the blank exposure from the real exposure. This means that when you shoot a 16 second exposure there will be an extra 16 seconds (while the blank exposure is taken) before the next shot can be taken. Though HP don't specify where noise reduction kicks in, it seems to be on any exposure longer than 1/15s. You can tell because the camera plays an audio "click" sound when an exposure is made. If you hear two "clicks", a second (noise reduction) exposure is being made. You can turn the "click" sound off for silent operation, though it's actually quite useful in confirming when you've taken a shot!

Sensitivity

There are three ISO settings, 100, 200 and 400, plus an "auto ISO" setting where the camera picks the sensitivity. For example, according to HP, high ISO is selected for sports mode to capture fast action and low ISO is selected for landscape mode for maximum image quality. However I found that in auto exposure mode, it may be preferable to manually select ISO under some circumstances. As an example I shot at 300mm on an overcast day. In auto mode with auto ISO set, the camera chose 1/175s at f3.1 (maximum aperture) and ISO 200. I would have greatly preferred a faster shutter speed when handholding the camera with the lens fully zoomed. By manually selecting ISO 400 I got a shutter speed of 1/350s, which gave me a much better chance of a sharp image.

Even in sports mode, auto ISO chose 200, not 400 and in Aperture Priority mode auto ISO chose ISO 100, even though that meant a shutter speed of 1/90s while the lens was zoomed fully out (300mm equivalent). So I'd regard the auto ISO option as something to be a little careful of. It doesn't seem to be taking focal length into account and it doesn't seem to maximize the ISO setting even when the camera gives a "shake warning" in the viewfinder indicating it thinks you need a tripod or flash to take sharp images.

Noise at ISO 400 is certainly higher than at ISO 200 and if  you zoom in close and look for it you can see the difference. That may account for the bias HP seem to have selected for lower auto ISO setting. However ISO 400 is certainly very usable and on normal prints up to 8x10 it isn't objectionable. I'd rather have a slightly noisier image than a less sharp one, so if I needed the extra shutter speed I wouldn't hesitate to use the ISO 400 setting. Noise levels at ISO 400 seem pretty much in line with similar small sensor digicams, but are higher than you'd find on DSLRs such as the EOS 10D. More noise is to be expected from the physically smaller pixels such as are found in the 5MP 1/1.8" format sensors when compared to those found in current DSLRs.

Self Timer

There are two self timer modes. The first releases the shutter after 10 seconds. The second takes two shots after a 10 second delay, 3 seconds apart - so you can shoot two different poses or catch your subject off guard after they think the shot has been taken

Burst Mode

The HP945 will shoot frames as fast as possible until the internal buffer fills. At the highest resolution and image quality this means you can shoot about 6 sequential frames. The images below show two sequential shots in burst mode. As you can see, in this case there was a 0.61 second time delay between the shots giving a frame rate of about 1.6 frames/sec.

Note that in burst mode it seems that all the shots are taken at the same exposure and with the same focus setting, so this is not a mode you could use for rapidly changing light conditions or for shooting a subject (e.g. a race car) moving rapidly towards or away from the camera.

Memory

The HP945 takes MMC and SD memory cards. The MMC cards must conform to the MMC January 2000 standard - apparently not all MMC cards do. The camera has been tested with SD cards up to 512MB (the largest currently available), though HP say that the HP945 is designed to work with future SD cards up to 2GB. Cards over 2GB will not work. HP quote the following typical file sizes, though full resolution images with lots of detail shot at ISO 400 can approach 4 MB.

Power

Power is provided by 4 x AA cells. You can use alkaline, photo-lithium, NiCads or MiMH cells. NiMh cells can be recharged in the camera using the optional AC adapter or camera dock. Note that neither is supplied with the camera. In camera recharge time is around 15 hrs, so if you want a fast recharge you'll need a 3rd party external charger for AA NiMH batteries. These are easy to find and typically cost around $30. The maximum power drawn by the camera is 1.3A at 6.2 volts. I don't have any data on how many shots you can expect from a set of batteries, but I've been using the camera with a set of  photo-lithium batteries for over a week and I've probably taken about 100 shots so far (mostly without flash). The battery indicator on the camera still reads "full", which according to the manual supplied indicates at least 65% of the battery life is remaining. This is a pretty unscientific test of battery life, but it does suggest that the HP945 isn't a battery hog

Interface

You can select two different USB 1.1 interfaces via the cameras menu. In the first mode the camera  is designated a digital camera device using the PTP standard and you need to have the HP software installed to download images. Since I did not have a copy of the HP software for this review I did not test this mode. In the second mode the camera is designated as a USB disk drive device using the MSDC standard and it should be recognized as such by the computer OS without the need of drivers. This worked fine for me using Windows 2000 Pro. I presume it will also work with all versions of Windows XP. I don't know how much native compatibility there is with Windows 98 or ME or with Mac OS.

In Camera Software

You can control all the usual functions from the software. You can turn sounds on and off, adjust LCD brightness, set power off and LCD review times, change the language of the menu prompts and select which (if any) of the various camera settings you want the camera to remember when it's turned off. You can remember all or any of the flash, white balance, exposure compensation, focus and burst mode settings.

The camera also has the HP "Instant share" feature which enables you to designate images to be automatically sent to various destinations the next time you connect your camera to your computer if  you have the HP software installed there. I haven't used this and I'm not sure why I'd want to, but, for example, you can set things so that images are automatically emailed and/or uploaded to a website.

You can also designate images to be printed next time you connect to your PC or to certain designated HP Printers. Again I function I didn't test and don't need, but I'm sure some consumers may find it useful.

The lens

Perhaps the star feature of the HP945 is the wide range of the zoom. It covers (in 35mm terms) 37-300mm (8x) and it's fast - f2.8 at the wide end, f3.1 at the tele end. Of course it's not really a 37-300mm zoom, it's actually a 7.6-61mm zoom, but due to the small sensor size (industry standard 1/1.8",  7.2mm x 5.3mm) it has the same field of view as a 37-300mm zoom would on a full frame 35mm body.

I would love to show you the samples of the full size images and shots comparing them to other similar camera images I have taken, but HP asked me not to publish such images from the pre-production sample camera since there could still be some software/hardware changes made before it is finally released. All I can really say is that there were no big surprises and image quality is consistent with a 5MP digicam and a wide range zoom. Good center sharpness with some edge aberrations. Certainly good enough for the majority of consumers who might consider buying this camera. I will add full size images and comparison shots if I get the chance to take them using a "certified production model" of the HP945. In the meantime HP gave me the OK to post a few small sample images taken with the pre-production HP945, just to brighten up the review. You shouldn't draw any conclusions about the final image quality of production cameras from these images.

Wide (37mm) Tele (300mm)

These last two images show the 8x range of the optical zoom on the HP945

Filters

HP note that filters can be used with the HP945 via a Tiffen adapter. The adapter is a short tube which screws into a set of 55mm threads which are on the body of the camera and holds 43mm diameter filters in front of the lens. This is a Tiffen part, not an HP part. For me, an adapter that took 52mm filters or larger would have been better since you can get just about any filter in existence in 52mm size, but 43mm isn't all that common (or at least it wasn't before digicam came along!). Though not specifically mentioned by HP I understand that Kenko makes an adapter which allows the use of 55mm filters. This is the same adapter which is used on the Fuji 4900/6900 cameras and is basically a 1.5" extension tube with male 55mm threads on one end which screws into the camera and female 55mm threads on the other for filters. Price should be around $10.

Conclusion

For the average consumer this camera provides a lot of features and a good price/performance ratio. The zoom range is greater than most other digicams on the market and the price is lower than any of its 5MP competitors with similar lenses. 5MP represents current "state of the art" in digital cameras of this type and is probably close to the limit of just how many pixels you can usefully cram into a 1/1.8" sensor.

Overall performance is creditable. Yes, AF and general operation could be a little faster, it would be nice to have some sort of external flash capability, multiple AF zones, a fully manual exposure mode could be useful and a ED glass lens totally free from chromatic and other aberrations would be nice (even if such a lens doesn't actually exist on any camera!). However these features would certainly increase the price and they probably would not be high on the list of the typical buyer of a camera in this class.

I can't think of any essential features that are really missing. It has sound recording capability, either at the time a shot is taken or added later. It has video with sound - though like all digicam video the image is small, the frame rate is slow, recording time is short (60s)  and it's certainly no competition for a real video camera! You couldn't expect a lens much longer than 300mm and in the automatic modes you really don't have to think about much but pushing the shutter. Focus, exposure and color balance are all good and there are a pretty full set of image adjustment and exposure mode options.

If you're looking for a small digicam with a built-in telephoto zoom lens, I'd say the HP945 should certainly be one of the cameras on your short list. It's clearly an improvement over the HP 850, with more pixels and more feature - even though the price has not changed much. The competition (Nikon 5700, Minolta 7 series and A1) offer more features, but they do so at a significantly higher price (ca.$1000 vs. ca.$550). The HP945 in auto mode is simple enough for absolute beginners, but allows reasonable manual control for somewhat more experienced photographers who want to make their own decisions about how to shoot. However it probably wouldn't be the camera of choice for advanced amateurs who require functions like external flash control, fully manual exposure, tracking (servo) AF and lossless image storage along with "state of the art" speed of operation.