There are two main ways to print digital photos directly from a camera: pull out its memory card and plug it into a printer or connect the two together with a PictBridge cable. Both of these techniques can be fiddly, particularly for somebody new to digital photography. For this type of photographer the Photosmart 422 could be ideal.

HP's new camera and printer bundle incorporates a printer dock, an idea pioneered by Kodak, where you simply plug the camera into the top of the printer to print your photos. A connector on the printer couples with a socket on the underside of the camera and the two devices then act as one. In the case of the Photosmart 422, the printer uses the LCD display on the back of the camera to display your shots, so you can select what to print.

The short, fat M415 camera has a good specification, with a 5-megapixel sensor, 3x optical and 6x digital zoom, 16MB of internal memory and an SD/MM card slot for adding more. As supplied, it can take eight shots at its default resolution, so you'll probably need to invest in a memory card early on. The 38mm LCD display on its back is a little small to see any detail, but is usable.

The printer takes 15 x 10cm (6 x 4-inch) photo paper, up to 20 sheets at a time, and produces good quality prints from its single tri-colour cartridge. Ironically, prints are better using a PC connection than directly from the camera, where we saw some banding and noise. The camera includes innovations like red-eye removal and adaptive lighting technology, which improves detail in darker or shadowed areas of a photo.

Running costs come out at around 22p per colour print. If you prefer black and white photos, you can fit a tri-grey cartridge instead. For some reason best known to HP, it quotes its tri-grey cartridge as producing less than half the prints of its high capacity colour cartridge, even though the tri-grey cartridge has greater capacity. It therefore costs around 30p for a black and white print.

Printing is quite quick, coming in between one and three quarter minutes (from a PC) and two minutes (from the camera). You simply plug the camera, backwards, into the dock on top of the printer and use its display to show your images, as you navigate through them using the ring of control buttons on the printer body.

Verdict
The idea behind this camera and printer combination is excellent. It's supremely easy to use and versatile too. It produces excellent photos from PC files but, in our experience, only fair ones directly from its camera. It's reasonably cheap to run, but you're likely to need more memory in the camera than the 16MB supplied.

Company: HP

Contact: 08705 474747

Tags: printer pictbridge hp photosmart hewlett-packard digitalphotography memory card printing ink cartridge