Richard Baguley

HP Photosmart 320

This camera is the least-expensive we've looked at recently by a considerable margin--and at $150 the price is certainly right for 2 megapixels. Also, the Photosmart 320 weighs in at only 7.2 ounces, making it one of the lightest cameras in our February 2002 comparison, though the camera is a little too large to fit comfortably into a pocket.
In our tests the 320 produced underwhelming images. Though the outdoor images had reasonably accurate colors, they were often underexposed, and there was a lot of obvious noise from the sensor in areas of flat color (such as blue skies). In the indoor photos, skin tones looked distinctly pale. The Photosmart 320 has no optical zoom, only a 4X digital zoom. The LCD screen on the back is small and difficult to see in bright light, but you also get an optical viewfinder. The flash, which is rather weak, doesn't penetrate more than a few feet in darkness.
Two buttons are located on the top of the camera--the shutter button for still images and another for taking movies--and it is easy to inadvertently press the wrong one when you're holding the camera up to your eye. The 320 has a Secure Digital card slot, but it does not come with a storage card. Instead it uses 8MB of built-in memory, which is enough to hold only seven pictures at the highest resolution.
The Photosmart 320 is a notably low-priced point-and-shoot camera, but most users will be better off spending a bit of extra money for a model that takes higher-quality pictures.