HP Photosmart R847 review

At its heart, the HP Photosmart R847 is simply a scaled-up version of the HP Photosmart R837. Like its predecessor, the R847 uses a slightly chunky metal body with a sliding lens cover that reminds us more than a little of the Sony Cyber-shot T-series cameras.

Design
The R847 carries the same 76mm (3-inch) LCD screen on the back panel, leaving just enough room for a large joypad and a comfortable, L-shaped zoom rocker.

The 76mm (3-inch) LCD screen leaves just enough room for a large joypad and a comfortable, L-shaped zoom rocker

Its 8-megapixel sensor stands out as the most notable improvement over the camera's 7-megapixel cousin but it's not the only change. The R847 can reach up to ISO 1,600, completely overtaking the R837's ISO 400 limit.

Plus, while the R837 uses an HP Precision lens, the R847 uses a Fuji nonbranded lens. They're both 39 by 118mm-equivalent lenses and they both share the same completely internal mechanism, however, and present little functional difference.

Features
HP designed the R847 to be simple to use, like the R837. While you can manually change settings like ISO and white balance, you'll probably spend most of your time in the camera's automatic or various scene preset modes.

Like most compact snapshot cameras, the R847 lacks more advanced exposure controls like aperture priority and shutter priority. While you can't change many settings while shooting, you can at least tweak your photos once they're in the camera with its myriad photo editing commands, also carried over from the R837.

Performance
Despite its higher resolution, the R847 consistently beat its little brother in our tests. After 1.9 seconds from power-on to first shot, it could take a new shot once every 1.3 seconds with the onboard flash turned off. With the flash enabled, that wait increased to a still-good 1.8 seconds. The shutter responded quickly, lagging only 0.5 seconds with our high-contrast target and one second with our low-contrast target.

Only in burst mode did the R847 lose to its predecessor, taking three full-resolution photos in 2.2 seconds for a rate of 1.4 frames per second, compared to the R837's 2.1fps. This slower burst rate can probably be attributed to the R847's higher resolution.