HP Photosmart M305

by HP

Product Details

Product Manual [2.36mb PDF]

• ASIN: B0006U624M
• Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,178 in Camera & Photo (See Top 100 in Camera & Photo)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: October 10, 2005

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars hp m305- great beginner camera, December 14, 2004

By 

perfectionist101 - See all my reviews

This review is from: HP Photosmart M305 (Electronics)

This camera is small enough to carry in a purse while still being able to take quality photos! I love the size of it and the larger 1.8" LCD screen- most cameras this small only have 1.5" LCDs! It has an awesome 3x optical zoom and a digital zoom you can use if you are already using the maximum optical zoom. One of my favorite features of this camera is being able to take photos in sepia and black and white!

My only complaints are they say this camera has a movie mode with sound, but it has a microphone and no speakers, so you can only listen to the audio of your movie if you connect it to the computer using the included software- it comes with HP Instant Share software that has good editing tools and effects. While in movie mode you cannot use the zoom either. I also wish this camera came with a camera case to store it in so the LCD would not get scratched.

Overall this is a 4 star camera, I don't give it 5 stars because of the movie sound/zoom issue. It's a good buy for the price!!!

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Power, forget it...., September 30, 2005

By 

Steven Schwab "Steve S" (Pompano Beach, FL United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: HP Photosmart M305 (Electronics)

This is my second HP camera. The first one I purchased was a hp Photosmart 620. The 620 was great. I am extremely dissapointed with the M305. If you use the flash, be prepared to change the batteries out after just a few pictures. If you use rechargeables (even the 2500 amh), you will need to have the charger nearby and be prepared to take the two AAs out every minute or so. Even when using alkalines, the camera drains the power to quickly. I have also lost pictures in the camera due to losing power and having problems with the camera writing to memory.

Stick to a camera that uses 4 AAs instead of two. Pass on the M305, I wish I had.

The camera also crashes when you try to take subsequent photos. Forget it.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Price is Right, February 7, 2005

By 

Greg "Greg" (Atlanta, GA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: HP Photosmart M305 (Electronics)

I am by no means a professional photographer, but I have a lot of experince with digital video processing and imagery. I wanted a digital camera that possessed macro photography potential and an optical zoom - digital zoom is useless on everything I have seen.

This camera was bought for $125, and for the price, performs fairly well. I have uploaded several photos to the image gallery so that you can judge the quality for yourself.

I am somewhat dissapointed in the overall quality of the photos from this camera. The JPEG compression is extreme, and although the camera lives at it's highest setting, 3MPBest, the compression is too aggressive. When editing in an image program, pixelization is quite apparent, and a 3.2MP high resolution picture gets compressed into a 1.2MP file. As a result, a busy scene contains numerous JPEG artifacts.

The Macro results are somewhat better. You may get as close as 4 inches to a subject - so it's not truly a MACRO lens, but it beats a minimum focal length of 22 inches.

Overall, this is a good camera for a beginner and the price is quite competitive for a camera with this feature set.

For anyone other than Grandma and the absolute beginner, the included .NET framework software (HP Image Zone 4) is total crap, and would best be avoided. It installs 5 or 6 processes at boot-time, and makes starting the computer take longer than necessary. If you use Windows XP / Server 2003, I would simply use the built in PTP protocol image downloader. In Windows 2000, set up the camera as a removable disk drive and copy the files from there.

HP should take note of this objection, and include the option for only installing the image downloader as opposed to installing a group of cheesy programs like Greeting Card Makers, Half-Assed image editors, and Web-Based image sharing apps. Every product in the HP line, including the $600 cameras, comes with this same software, and I believe they are hurting sales as many companies will shy away from sending, for instance, an insurance investigator or agent into the field with a camera that is supported with software that requires the installation of this sort of nonsense.