HP Photosmart R837: Wrinkles and blemishes be gone!

Tired of deleting your digital shots because someone says, “That makes me look old,” or “I look too fat”? Now your friends and family can appear nearly as perfect as photo-retouched models on magazine covers: HP’s diminutive new Photosmart R837 has in-camera tools to remove wrinkles, blemishes, and excess weight. It can even has "pet-eye fix," which can make your pets look better by removing red-eye (or green, blue, white or yellow eye, depending on the pet).

Here’s how the wrinkle and blemish removal feature works: Display the shot you want to fix on the large LCD and navigate the menus to “Enhance Photos.” If you then choose “Touch Up,” you’ll see a display similar to the one shown above. 

You move the little yellow square to the spot on the photo you want to fix and, with the press of a button the blemish or wrinkle is gone. The camera saves the original photo as well as the altered one on its storage card.

Here are before and after shots for a blemish-removal I did using the R837:

The tool is similar to Photoshop’s “spot healing brush,” except that putting it in the camera makes it more convenient to use. Other choices on the Enhance Photos display include Slimming and Brightness/Contrast.

When I told Lisa Lee Freeman, editor of ShopSmart, our shopping magazine, about the R837, she asked me to use the slimming feature to make her look thinner. Here’s the result:

Not bad, but Lisa’s face seems a bit too thin.

I also did a shot of Lisa by holding the camera in portrait mode (sideways). When I applied the slimming feature to that shot, the “slimming” feature became a “chubbying” one:

This happened because the camera still adjusted the image as if it had been shot in landscape orientation (we've rotated the images here so they can be viewed properly). Sorry, Lisa! (This less-than-complimentary shot is being posted here strictly in the cause of consumer education ;-)  The solution to this unintended result is to rotate a portrait-oriented shot you’ve already taken (which the R837 can do) before applying the slimming feature.

The R837 has 7-megapixel resolution and a 3x (39- to 118-mm) zoom. It turns off and on via a sliding lens cover; personally, I prefer a conventional on/off button. And it came without a printed user manual. To learn about its controls and operation, I had to display or print the 56-page manual that’s on the included CD in the form of a PDF file.

— Jeff Fox, Technology Editor

Comments

[missy wandermeyer]

this camera is amazing! how would u find the price?

[Lisa Small]

I researched this camera across a dozen camera-bug sites this summer. The photos are slightly softer than those achieved with the 15x Canon S3 and the Sony H7 / H9. I didn't bother checking the Canon S5 because, for my purposes, it is a step DOWN from the earlier S3. Canon degraded the time-lapse photography capacity so badly it's useless, for example. But back to the Olympus 18X -- the photos were just a bit too soft in comparison to the Canon & Sony 15x's.

[Randy Welsh]

My cousin just got the camera and loves it!

her and her husband are tech heads so figuring everything out with this camera wasn't a big deal to them!

But for the rest of use, having to print out a 56-page manual is uncool, and a ink cartridge killer.

The photo quality is great and ultra slim style is nice, you get a lot in a little camera with the R837!

[cc]

hj