Waist Disposal

The skinny on HP’s new “slimming” digicam

February 22, 2006—No matter how that post-New Year’s diet is going, HP’s Photosmart R927 is one digital camera you may enjoy posing for. That’s because it makes subjects look thinner. No, really. We tested it out (not that we need to look any slimmer, of course), and it works—a neat trick the camera achieves by "intelligently removing" pixels from the center of the frame while expanding details at the edges. In case the above isn’t enough of a selling point by itself, the sleek, brushed steel R927 also boasts an 8.2-megapixel image sensor, in-camera red-eye removal, a category-leading three-inch display, and a very cool “Adaptive Light Bracketing” feature that captures three different versions of a single shot at varying light levels—from which you pick the best one. Now if it just had a feature that made certain, um, bits look bigger, we’d really be impressed.
HP Photosmart R927, $399, available March 1 from www.hp.com.