HP Photosmart m537 Full Review

In my first post of 2025 I revealed the overall challenge I am doing for this year and that is shooting twelve more cameras that weren't reviewed in 2023 but this time for an entire month instead of a week, and posting the results of a "straight out of camera" jpeg vs editing them myself in POST.

January is my least favorite month in all of the year.  Living in a Northern climate our winters are typically very brutal and puts severe limits of how much outdoor activities many of us can or are willing to do (some "adjust to it" better then others.  I am one of the "others").

So to start this off I took the cheapest working digital camera I own which was also my last purchase of 2024 (not including cameras that were gifted to me or in a trade) which was a non-assuming pocket digi-cam from 2007: An HP Photosmart m537

Yes, you heard right an HP camera.  Not a webcam but an actual honest stand-alone pocket camera that writes images to a SD card.

In the early to mid 2000s Digital Pocket cameras were all the rage.  They were the "smartphone like camera device" you could have on you at any moment to quickly take a photo to capture a moment and then turn it off and put it away. 

So many companies got on the "make a cheap digital camera" boat including companies well known for cheap digital cameras like Kodak and Vivtar; but also a wide array of other electronics companies such as HP, Toshiba, Sanyo, GE, HP, Casio (whom actually had good cameras) etc.  

The pocket camera market stayed that way until margins became thinner and the "major camera companies" (Canon, Nikon, Sony, Panasonic, Olympus, Fuji and Pentax/Ricoh) started taking away the smaller pieces of the pie left for companies like HP away.

But enough with the history of Digicams, let's start the actual review. I will start off by admitting that the HP Photosmart m537 is not the worst Digital Camera in my collection;  that title is contested either by the GE RS1400 or the Coleman Xtreme waterproof camera.  

The HP digicam does its job a lot better then either of those two cameras in all respects including ease of use and image quality; but the m547 is defiantly among the most boring and unassuming cameras to use in my collection.

It turns on relatively fast and has a quick shutdown too (for a 2007 era digicam atleast) and there is very little shutter lag which was a common issue with old digicams. 

Images shot straight out of camera have fairly good colors and contrast along the lines of what a CCD enthusiast would expect under the right lighting of course.  

When shot in overcast conditions the colors are a lot duller and it tends to underexpose shots, though its lightmeter overall is a lot more accurate then I was expecting; which is a good thing as the exposure cannot be compensated or adjusted in any way at all which I will get to soon.

My biggest complaint about this camera was not the handling/ergonomics nor the Image Quality/Colors/Exposure but that this camera was honestly just really boring to use.

For "Full Auto Digicams" the HP Photosmart is about as full auto as you can get.  It has no P mode, and there is no way of adjusting exposure compensation in any embedded "creative mode" either. The amount of creative modes that can be "manually" set is very limited and do not alter the color profile of the camera in any way, and most of the creative modes have the internal flash forced on if selected manually.

Therefore the only real way to shoot this camera is to use full auto, where you can atleast change one very important setting:  Flash ON or OFF.  Every time the camera is shut off however you need to disable the flash manually as it will not remember this setting and will set the default flash to auto (which means it will fire in any condition that is not in direct bright sunlight including overcast days.

Ergonomically the camera is fine. It feels like dozens of other digicams of its era hower: an unassuming box with rounded edges slightly bigger then a deck of playing cards that can easily fit into a jacket, loose fitting pants or dress shirt pocket. It takes AA batteries instead of a proprietary LiION battery pack making getting batteries in the field incase you forgot to re-charge the camera a snap which I know a lot of digicam enthusiasts look for.  (myself I actually prefer to have that rechargeable pack.

With the straight out of camera challenge, I am going to be relying on the camera to "make adjustments for me as I tell it to" like the average user but this camera didn't have those features.  

There are no "color modes" to shoot an image more vibrantly or in Black and white, and there is no way to adjust the exposure compensation so you are stuck with the fully "press the button get digital photo" line of thinking.

While this forced "full auto" method of shooting did force me to think about the composition of a photo a lot more then usual and really work that into the creative aspect of this type of photography it did make this camera feel extremely boring to use overall.

In 2007 for someone who just wants to get photos of their family and not think about the actual photography portion at all this wouldn't be the worst camera you could buy and was probably worth the asking price for the average person that wants some quick vacation selfies or photos at a family event.

All that said, I'm glad to be done with Jan and this camera put on the shelf of "cameras I will probably never shoot again (or will only shoot as a dare or if I am extremely bored).  It will be the most lackluster camera of this entire year of camera reviews; somewhat fitting for the most lackluster month of the entire year. 

That's really all I have to say about the HP Photosmart m537.  Can I recommend it to someone looking for a Digicam?  No no really- there are far better options out there even for something small and compact as this camera is.  I rate it as a "perfectly average" ranking of a C to C minus.

I will leave you with a few more photos from this camera, done with no editing at all and simply uploading them to this blog post.

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For this upcoming month (Feb), I will be shooting something bigger and newer yet still somewhat pocketable:  An Olympus PEN E-PL6. In keeping with the "pocket" theme the lens attached for the review is going to be the smallest M43rds lens I own too which is the 14-42 "Pancake Kit Zoom lens" Olympus made for their later PEN series of cameras. 

This camera and lens put together will get you get a small (albeit weighty) compact camera that feels very well built. The PEN and pancake zoom lens make this camera still fit into a jacket pocket (though a pants pocket or shirt pocket is now out of the question.