HP PhotoSmart C612

I recently bought my first digital camera, the HP Photosmart C612, and have been delighted with its performance and ease of use. The camera was easy to set up and I was taking pictures within 5 minutes of opening the box.

The only thing that confused me for a while was trying to change the date display from the American mm/dd/yy system to the more familiar UK dd/mm/yy system. I could not get the camera's LCD date display to change. I noticed later when I downloaded the photos to my computer that the date and time info had in fact transferred in the format I wanted. I think the manual should have included more detail for this setting. It seems to me that the LCD is permanently set to American date format and that altering the settings on the camera changes the format of info stored with each photo and is accessed once the photos have been downloaded

Transferring the photos manually to my Apple iMac was very straightforward. The camera is recognised as an additional disk drive and I simply dragged the JPEG files across to the Apple's hard disk. I also tried using the bundled Photo Impression software to transfer the photos automatically to the Mac. The automatic transfer worked fine but I found the Photo Impression software a bit confusing to use, and there wasn't a printed manual.

I also hooked up the camera to a PC laptop running Windows XP. The laptop immediately offered to transfer the photos to the 'My Pictures' folder. I accepted this offer and the photos transferred smoothly. I was impressed by this and didn't feel the need to install the bundled PC software that would provide an automatic download.

The quality of the photos is very good, even on the medium resolution. The camera is more than adequate for my needs. I am more than happy at this stage to have exposure etc automatically set.

I am happy to recommend this product.