Peregrine

My wife and I drove up to my hometown of Weiser, Idaho for my baby sister Kayla’s High School graduation. On the way north, we stopped at Best Buy and took a look at the HP Photosmart E317 digital photo camera. I bought one on sale for only $89 (plus tax) and we got back on the road.

Last night, I got home from Washington, D.C., Virginia (a.k.a. Alexandria; hehe) at about 11:30pm. Before going to bed, I grabbed a small bite and watched a little TV (for 10 minutes or so) while eating. There was a Best Buy ad on TV for the HP digital camera, which is why I wanted to check it out.

I’ve only taken a couple of pictures, so far, but they’ve turned out quite well. It’s very easy to use, which is good since it doesn’t come with a “real” user’s guide (like I would need it, I mean, come on! :) ). It’s a 5MP camera, producing images at 2560×1920 resolution (quite a bit better than what you get with 35mm film). It also found all the photos that were on the 512MB SD card I’ve used with my digital video camera (it will take stills on SD or discs). I have almost 600 photos (at 1280×1024) on there already and the camera says that I can fit another 314 (at 2560×1920) on before I fill up the card.

My Dad recently bought an Olympus photo printer. I plugged the HP Photosmart E317 into the printer with the USB cable that came with the camera, surffed through (on the camera) and picked out 3 pictures and hit print (on the camera) and in about 2 minutes I had 3 photos on real photo paper. The quality is excellent, too.

Overall, I can definitely recommend this camera to others, especially while it’s on sale at Best Buy for only $89. It even comes with Lithium batteries and a carrying case that can be worn on your belt.

A word to the wise, though: if you have or are going to purchase a digital photo camera that uses SD cards (or similar) get the high speed kind. You’ll be thanking me later when you see how long other people have to wait before taking another shot. The 512MB SD card I am currently using is of the standard speed variety, and it takes about 8 seconds to finish writing a 5MP JPEG to the card. Thankfully, this camera has 16MB RAM, so I can take a few photos in a row and let it write them to the card in the background (if I’m not waiting for the flash to recharge). Still, I wish I had a faster card for these cameras.

Some other nice features:
- You can record audio
- You can record audio notes about a picture while browsing through them
- It can take video
- When plugging it into your computer, it can be configured to show up either as a storage device (SCSI disk, like an SD card reader), or as a camera which you could use with video conferencing software.

No, HP is not giving me anything for plugging this camera. The opinions expressed here are entirely my own. Blah, blah, blah.