Hewlett Packard's new digital camera takes many steps in the right direction to introduce professional-level features for the consumer photographer, yet suffers from a few, minor flaws that detract from its overall polished design.

Featuring a fairly swanky 5.3MP 36-bit CCD (which offers image resolutions up to 2,608 x 1,952) and eight times optical zoom you're certainly able to take some masterful and gorgeous images with this camera, but many of its best features are hidden in the menus.

The ace in its hand is HP's Adaptive Lighting Technology, which intuitively increases the brightness and contrast for darkened portions of your subject as the image is taken. This means that shots taken against a bright background will no longer result in shadowed foreground subjects with crisp backgrounds, but with crisp foreground subjects [I]and[/I] background. It's a small, but essential piece of technology, and it comes with two intensity settings (depending on ambient lighting), or it can be just left off.

The 945 comes with a 32MB SD card, which is enough for 96 photos (at 1MP) or around 12 or so at highest resolution. For more artistic shots you can swap from full colour to black and white or sepia, or you can toy with the 945's wealth of settings. HP has made this camera's menu system fairly intuitive for when you switch from auto control to manual.

With its nice professional styled body, it's a pity that the camera doesn't feel more rugged, as you're left with the impression of fragility. It's not the case, but I found that I was taking much more care with this camera than others of a similar ilk. The other irritant is that the Photosmart 945 refuses to save settings when you switch it off and on, so you're back at default settings. This was a particular problem as the shutter speed setting default is quite slow, and can lull you into moving the camera at the crucial moment resulting in blurred images, but mainly it's a hassle re-setting image qualities, colour-types and shutter speeds every time.