HP Mobile Camera for PDAs

 Greetings and welcome to LGR Odd ware!

Where were taking a look at hardware and software hat is odd, forgotten and obsolete. And today we get this little thingy right here. This is the HP Photo smart Mobile Camera from 2003 a 1.3 megapixel digital camera, with manual focusing and everything, that’s bolted onto an SD card. And you got an interface that plugs straight in to compatible PDAs in the early 2000.

Let’s check this thing out. So right here we have the HP Photo smart Mobile Camera for iPaq Pocket PCs, including a series of hx1000 devices and this was sold at an initial asking price of 149.99 USD in October of 2003 which was when it first hit the North American market. And just a real quick thanks to TJ, an LGR viewer who sent this in among some other awesome things. Very much appreciated. I have been looking out for one of these for a little while actually because I had an HP iPaq back in the day. 

I remember reading about this and always thought it would be super cool to have a digital camera in the Palm of my hand and like a big old touchscreen device, man, imagine that, It really was a novel idea and the fact that it made use of an SD card slot just made it all the more interesting and that’s why it’s still interesting, despite being very much obsolete in terms of like, just everything has a camera now.

So you don’t need to use an SD card slot to get one, but for a time it made sense. And that’s why I think that this is worth taking a look at. So we’ve got some quick specifications here, 1.3 megapixels *total* resolution. I’m not sure if that means it upscale or what, might do some sort of interpolation. And 4X digital zoom, SDIO interface. 

Well get to that here in a sec, video capture and voice annotation. So that’s a thing, I didn’t actually know it did video capture back when I first learned about this. The requirements there are a little hard to read there, but Windows 98/ME, XP, Pentium 2, 64 megs of RAM your standard stuff really. It doesn’t need the software for much of anything except for just setting up the stuff to put on the iPaq itself, I believe and I’m sure there’s some kind of Photo smart software maybe for doing a little bit of basic image manipulation.

Let’s go ahead and open it up really quick, just to get a little closer look at it. So there is all it comes inside of it at least, in this one that I have here. Okay, so we got a CD full of software and there is a user’s guide on there, I was wondering about that. So digital not physical.  HP Photo Center, there’s that, iPaq Image Zone, I’m assuming that’s what goes on the PDA itself and of course the drivers for Windows.

Yeah a product warranty. Of course the camera itself and a nice little carrying pouch, look at this. So yeah, that’s a magnetic thing going on there. Ah, wasn’t expecting that. It’s got a little, belt loop or a clip. Yeah belt loop. So this is pretty darn similar to the pouch that the iPaq itself would have used. This is sort of a leathery leatherette thing, I don’t know, smells like leather. Also just smells old and musty. Anyway, it looks like that goes in there. Aw, that’s just delightful.

And of course, here is the HP Photo smart Mobile Camera itself. It really is just an SD card interface connected to a camera. And then you’ve got, this part here that does this, one goes all the way around. Want to do selfies? There you go.

And I’m assuming, yeah, we got a little adjustment here for doing macro, more further off focusing. Say let’s just briefly talk about the SD card interface here because this is actually SDIO which is an SD card interface extension. And that allowed the connection of peripherals like this through the host SD controller. Now really the interfaces themselves are identical between SD and SDIO in terms of physically and electrically.

So SDIO slots like the ones that are in these HP PDAs they support normal SD cards and MMC just fine. But your regular SD card slot will not work with an SDIO device unless its specifically built to support it. And as an interesting little side note SDIO is actually still used to connect WiFi and Bluetooth on ARM and Intel Atom systems, including just countless. 

Android and Windows Atom tablets using things like Realtek wireless interface chips. As well as on single board computers like the Raspberry Pi 3 and 4 that use SDIO as an interface for its WiFi and Bluetooth capabilities. So yeah, even if you’ve never used a little thingies like this, you may have very well used SDIO in something at some point.

Although were talking about internal integrated stuff there. Whereas removable SDIO like this little camera here has largely been replaced with USB and/or Lightning depending on your mobile device of choice. Why bother messing with putting things in a card when you can just plug it in through a cable somewhere. At least until phones go without cables, ugh. 

And the HP Photo smart here was not the only SDIO camera. So it wasn’t like a one-off or anything. There were others like this Specter SDC that I’ve come across and the Life View FlyCAM SD each of which were available for a couple of years around the same time as the Photo smart and had pretty similar specs as far as I can tell.

And it also wasn’t just cameras that were stuffed into SDIO card interfaces like this. You also had GPSs and other various wireless things like this Low Power SDIO Wireless LAN Card. So yeah, if your PDA didn’t have WiFi, there you go.

You can do that. My PDA, the HP iPaq RX1955 did have WiFi and that was a selling point at the time. They didn’t have WiFi for a good little while actually. But yeah, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, a whole bunch of other things were SDIO devices.

So while there were a lot of devices I don’t know how well these cameras actually ended up doing. I don’t remember seeing anyone who actually had one back in the day, and I knew a number of folks that were super into the PDA scene. So who knows?

I mean, the thing is, like. A decent PDA, running Windows Mobile 2003 for Pocket PC, which is what this required? That would cost you anywhere from $400 to $650 or so in 2003. Let’s just say $550 total for the camera and a PDA itself.

That sounds okay I guess, for a digital camera solution in a smart device. But for the same price, that would also get you a really nice digital camera at the time. Like a five megapixel Olympus seen advertised here. 3X optical zoom, not just relying on crappy digital. That was just so much better for the same price. Or if you really went cheap you’d get a Concord 3.1 megapixel digital for $150. It’s probably garbage, but hey, it didn’t require a PDA. I mean that’s, on its own right there, the same price as just an SDIO camera.

I also ran across some old reviews from users complaining about terrible low-light performance making it essentially unusable indoors. So that’s something we are gonna have to check out here. And also the SD card interface being a pop-out solution, it’s meant to sort of press in and out really quickly, unlike CompactFlash, for example, where those they stay in their, unless you pull on them pretty good. Or maybe there’s a button to push them out off to the side or something.

But yeah, there were actually CF card slot cameras too. And I noticed some reviewers mentioning that those might be a better buy, if you had a PDA that supported it. But yeah, with the HP Photo smart Mobile Camera here you’re meant to use it with this something like this and the iPaq I have here, this just has a little SD card slot inserts, just plastic. And then this goes on the top like that.

And there you go. And you can see you how relatively easy it would be to just sort of maybe bump it up against something and oh, the cameras coming out. Especially since it makes it kinda top heavy. I don’t know, I wouldn’t see it as being a huge problem, but who knows, after using this for a couple of days, we’ll see. There you go. Flip it around. 

What a goofy looking thing. Let’s set it up on Windows, get some software onto here and then go and take some pictures with an SD card camera. All right, got the LGR Windows XP build going here and let’s get it set up. So let’s see, camera driver, duh-deh-dah yeah, put everything on there.

We could read the user’s guide first but were not gonna do that. So it looks like it’s just going ahead and taking care of the application installation by itself for the iPaq side of things. The program is from an unknown publisher. Do you want to continue?

It’s from HP, HP device. But whatever man. So it’s getting that cab file copied over and has been successfully copied and also doing Image Zone and Image Transfer. So that’s still going on down here actually in the background I guess ActiveSync has taken care of that. Yeah, It looks like we have an Arc Soft HP Photo Center that goes on the Windows side of things. And now let’s look at the user’s guide. Since we’ve already installed the dang thing. Do I not have Acrobat on here?

No, I don’t. Guess were not gonna read. Go ahead and restart here. Let’s see what we can do with just the iPaq side of things. To see if that’s going real quick. Taken off this polarizer, causes so many problems with LCDs. Okay, assuming it has installed some programs on here somewhere. Yeah, we’ve got Photo smart Mobile something, Image Zone, and it put something else on there. But I don’t remember what it was. Oh yeah, HP Image Transfer. 

I’m assuming that’ll work with software on the PC side of things. So let’s just insert the camera. Let’s see if it does anything. Oh, look at that! A live video feed of our CRT. Oh no. Well... That’s an immediate not great thing. The stylus is blocked by the camera itself. Perhaps it was designed for devices with the stylus  on the other side, but then it’d be kind of blocking like, the headphone jack, which is where it is on here. Anyway, let’s just take a picture with, yeah I’m assuming that is the shutter.

Wow, that is a loud shutter. Ooh, that looks like an awful photo. Just take a picture of my speakers here. Neat! Ah, let’s go ahead and try it out and take some pictures. So whenever I’m testing a camera I often like to capture some street art and this area in particular is a favorite with all the bold lines and vibrant colors blasted by direct sunlight. Though its proving difficult to see the PDAs screen with that late morning sun overhead. 

So I just left everything on auto and here’s the resulting photo. Which immediately gets us into the way the HP Mobile Camera often treats vibrant scenes. If you’ve got a lot of bright, evenly distributed light it’ll always darken in the image to the point where none of the highlights are blown out  and the shadows aren’t crunching too low.

But the overall results are also quite a bit darker than it is to the naked eye. The colors are also less saturated with white balance skewing warmer rather than cooler. Moving on and another spot I like visiting is this alley down here, called Chicken Alley, for obvious reasons. I have always liked this piece with his bright blues and reds with black and white shapes on top of brick. 

It’s just awesome. And again, the camera ends up compensating for sunlight to the point where the photo ends up being quite dark and low on saturation with a bit of chromatic aberration going on with certain bright highlights like the wet pavement on the bottom right.

It’s a nice crispy image for 1.3 megapixels though, no complaints there. And its flat enough so that there’s enough dynamic range to correct things after the fact, like this. Yeah. And I’d much rather have a flat image I can correct than a blown out picture rats ruined by over-correcting one way or another. Kind of like what ended up happening here. I was wandering past this parking area and noticed this fantastic Toyota Land Cruiser. Oh, just look at this thing. An FJ40 I guess?

I’m no expert on these, but I’ve always loved the way they look. And this one was just in phenomenal shape and looking awesome up against all that light coming in. Of course the little Photo smart isn’t equipped to handle such a wide difference in illumination. So it went with keeping the Land Cruiser bright but visible. 

On a background that’s completely washed out. Still better than a pitch black silhouette. But yeah, there’s only so much it could do here. And that’s half the reason I took the photo, since I was curious how it’d handle it. That and the fact that that Toyota is just amazing. And here’s another scene I like capturing in the morning this street that goes up the hill there with omnipresent shadows from the buildings on the left.

And it’s looking even more appealing this morning with the rain water draining down the road there. Once again, the HP did a better job than I thought it would. The shadows have some range to them. The skies still got some blue and isn’t all washed out. And the highlights on the building to the right and direct sunlight still have some good detailing color. 

It is notably zoomed in though, despite me standing across the road, the little lens here, doesn’t have the widest field of view, but it’s not terrible either, something you can typically compensate for, by backing up a few steps if you want. This alley is another place I like taking pictures cause I just like alleys and these steps and power lines look cool. It’s also another good spot to see what older digital cameras do with it.

And yeah, not bad in my opinion, all that sunlight coming in from the east washed out the sky a bit. But it did well handling the shadows on the bricks and underneath the stairs. And again, the color or DE saturated while also being on the warmer side, giving it an arguably appealing vintage look that I’m really starting to dig. On up from here there’s another cool spot where you can get a decent look at downtown Asheville, a few floors up in a parking garage and with a longer wider view like this, I figured it’d be a good spot to put that 4X digital zoom to the test. With my subject being the Flatiron building off in the distance, that wide, yellowish, off-white building in the middle there. And well, this is one of those shots where the Mobile Camera adjusted things in an interesting way.

I can’t tell whether I like it or not. I did it all right job of keeping my subject visible, but at the expense of practically everything else in the frame. The black levels are cranked down so far here that there’s basically nothing left. And now, as for the digital zoom  well at 2X this is what you get. Well which I mean, yeah cropping your photo is just the way digital zooms work. 

So I expected that, but usually the camera upscale the cropped image to the resolution you’re shooting in. Not here. Instead it just crops your picture and leaves it at whatever that size ends up being. Same with the 4X dig zoom. It’s just even more cropped. So now were left with this postage stamp-sized photo that’s a tiny portion of the original shot. I never use digital zooms anyway, but this right here takes the cake in terms of being truly useless.

All right, moving on to another area. And this clock is something I always like capturing and it’s a good opportunity to shoot something portrait instead of landscape. And once again, the little Photo smart really surprised me. This ended up being one of my favorite pictures taken over the last few days. The colors are warm and the shadows have real range to them. And the sky ended up being this deep blue with some lovely vignette in the corners. I don’t know, I really like this.

It reminds me of a 35mm print more than a quick PDA photo shot with a tiny SD card camera from 2003. And since the camera can turn around 180 degrees I figured why not test that out with a selfie on this windy street corner.

I ended up proving somewhat tricky though, due to the focusing, which is entirely manual and really finicky to get right on the PDA screen. So it ended up a bit soft, but hey, it did a good job with skin tones and there’s even some decent depth of field going on, but yeah, the disparity between the live preview and the processed photo only got more apparent from here. 

So like check out these little fairy closets or mouse homes or whatever you want to call them. They dock the sides of certain buildings down here and are only a few inches tall. So I figured it’d be a good place to test the lens and macro mode. And it didn’t quite go as planned. It’s not that the cameras not capable. The issue here is that what you see on the PDA screen when you’re trying to take a picture, really doesn’t match the eventual processed photo.

What you’re seeing is more of a general idea of what you’ll be taking a picture of, so getting close or small things precisely in focus is a total crapshoot. Like this little door right here looks perfectly crisp in the live viewfinder feed  but it’s all blurry in the final shot. 

This blue door fared better, but only after trying like five times. And even then it’s still not as clear as I’d like. But you know, whenever you do get it right the Mobile Camera does a pretty good job with macro. Let’s check out what commander keen and tiny doom guy look like shot just a few centimeters from the lens.

Yeah, it’s not bad at all. I’m legit impressed with the macro on this thing. It’s not the sharpest cleanest image of course and on less busy shots like this, the color noise and aliasing caused by the sensor is more apparent. But overall, yeah, it’s still impressive for what it is and yeah, that was an indoor shot and it’s not supposed to be any good at taking indoor shots. 

While I was blasting that scene with light. If you’re at a photograph, just a normally lit indoor scene like my center set up here. Well, the results are less than charitable. The reviews weren’t wrong when they were saying that it did very badly with lower light conditions or even medium light conditions. This camera really needs to be outside or just blasted with a ton of light if you’re indoors

And you’re gonna have to provide that light yourself since there is no flash. And finally, we can’t forget about video because yeah it does that. And to test that its back out onto this random intersection to record some passing cars. Here it is with my phones camera. And here it is what the highest resolution mode of the mobile came from HP. A whopping 320 by 340 max resolution and like I don’t know if you frames per second maybe. And there is also a higher frame rate mode that shoots in 160 by 120.

Yeah, I guess it captures more frames and a few more colors too. But I mean, at this point it’s all abstract slideshow art. So who knows, honestly, just the fact that it shoots video with sound at all is pretty cool. But man, that early 2000 aesthetic is rough and rose-tinted nostalgia can only extend so far. But anyway, now that we’ve got some pictures and videos taken lets head back and transfer stuff to a PC. Okay, got a direct capture going with Windows XP now. 

And well just go ahead and plug it in and see what happens. Yeah, ActiveSync doing its thing and it looks like its sees, yeah the images. So it’s just gonna copy them over directly, I suppose. So that’s cool. I was wondering if that’s how it would work if it would do anything different just with the HP software that is installed on the PC side of things like, whoops, that’s Photo Center here I guess this one mobile print is just not winked to print out your things in a website.

Yeah, Pocket PC print. The beauty of ActiveSync, PDAs have made things really easy. You just plug it in and whatever was different between your PC and the PDA would just synchronize them together. In this case the difference is that there’s a bunch of images and videos on the PDA. So this is a, were looking at the PDA side of things. 

All of our photos and videos are still on the iPaq. But if we were to go over to wherever it copied them, say I went to do my pictures, HP Image Transfer. And it looks like a copied, just every image that was on the PDA, even the just demo images that it came with. But yeah, here are all of our snapshots including that first terrible photo of the CRT there and the blurry photos I was trying to take of the speaker and a blurry selfie. And yeah, let’s check out the HP Photo Center software. See if there’s anything interesting in here and well it looks like it’s just a browser.

All right, thumbnails, unload images.

Yeah, I guess if you wanted to do it that way, you probably could. I don’t know, I mean, it seems to be that ActiveSync took care of all that. So whatever we can create slideshows, Web albums, Oh my, archive to CD. Yes, 2003. I was expecting something like image manipulation stuff, maybe that isn’t here. Let’s just open one of those from an earlier lovely Toyota. Let’s see, we got just kind of looking around through the photos here, but to editor, there we go. 

Yeah, is a kind of what I was expecting you can get cropping, resizing, rotating, auto fix let’s see what it thinks. Oh, it’s giving us a lot of options. Look at that. It’s just changing the gamma, like the levels, auto fix. That’s not auto at all. That’s just like nine different options.

Okay, enhance, brightness and contrast and hue and saturation and sharpen and blur. Drawing if we want to draw directly on our image, sweet. You can add text. We got Red Eye Correction, I guess that’s it. So, very basic assortment of image editing things you’d expect from pretty much any application that came with a digital camera back then. 

Guess that’s it for the Windows XP side of things, pretty straightforward ActiveSync takes care of it. So that’s awesome. And lastly here, and let’s take a look a little bit closer adjust the software side of things on the PDA. Cause it didn’t actually show a whole lot of that earlier, get the stylist out because of course the camera blocks it.

And when I do insert it, yeah. You can get the app opening automatically, eventually. And it also happens whenever you have it turned off like that. It’s not actually turned off, but screen is. And then if you turn it back on it will reopen the app very slowly. So there’s that, you can have to deal with that every time you have it pulling out of your pocket or whatever. 

Another thing pulling out of my pocket, I was saying it’s sort of loose in there. Well, it’s even looser than I thought initially look at that. So it’s not even that if you bump it the pop-out part will just pop out. That’s one thing. But then, I mean it’s in there right now supposed to be snug but, I’m mean it just comes out very, very easily.

So I don’t know if that’s a fault of this particular device or the SD card format of the slot. Something weird is going on. Now, none of my other SD cards have this issue in here. So, but then they’re not, sticking out either. So maybe it’s just, that’s just how it is. And nothing looks broken just doesn’t want to stay in there. 

So I ended up using a little bit of this sticky tack just sort of hold it in place. While I was out about taking photos. So that’s not ideal, but it is what it is I guess. And again, I want to re-emphasize how cool it is to have this rotating lens here just swiveling around like that. This made this very, very useful for getting shots down low or even stuff up high.

Like if I wanted to tilt it up, you could just do that and get some cool building shots or whatever I wanted to do. Or more often than not like I was looking at it from this angle, just trying to get it out of the sun. So I’d have to tilt this to sort of correct for it. And they look, there we go. I’ve got it at an angle and its taking a straight on photo. Not that you can see very much because the viewing angles on this screen are not ideal for a camera. And taking a picture is incredibly simple.

You just have to have the one little shutter button there and there’s that,[shutter sound] of course, you’ve got to make sure everything is manually in focus. And it does change a little bit. I was saying earlier there with the live view, not being the most accurate thing it’s just kind of very slow to update.

And it’s hard to tell on that little screen, sometimes what’s in focus and what’s not, especially when you’re talking macro and it’s just this, this live view that is less sharp even than the resulting processed image when you actually take a photo.

So that’s tricky, we’ve got the digital zoom here. With its resulting terribly cropped images that aren’t up scaled. And then there are a number of camera settings in here. So yeah, you can’t actually change this from being auto mode to less so, so they got white balance. The color range here is a black and white negative. Have it on best compression which gives a larger file size, but better quality. And this was the default resolution here. I wanted it this aspect ratio, you can go up to 1280 by 1024.

You have the auto exposure metering. So I just had it on center weighted but you can’t change like f-stop, ISO, shutter speed, anything like that. It is just automatically taken care of. There’s also camera sounds, instant review a little preview that it pops up after the live preview. A self-timer and something called Business Card Framing Aid. I haven’t checked this. Let’s see what that does.

Okay, it just, if you’re taking photos of a business card I suppose there’s that. It’s just gotta little outline there and it appears to have frozen. Yeah, that happens rather often too I ran into that a lot while I was out there. So just kind of have to, yeah try and restart it. Sometimes it’ll restart, sometimes it won’t. There we go, that worked. 

And yeah video resolution audio on and off. And that’s pretty much it everything else is more or less automatic. And the last thing here is the iPaq Image Zone. And this is pretty similar to the HP software that is on the Windows side of things, where you have a gallery of all your photos and videos and whatnot and you can look at them, manage them just a little bit.

You can edit their names, view a slideshow, rotate images like this one right in here needs to be rotated. So what not enough memory?

Why am I seeing any problems here? 

And of course you can’t insert an SD card for additional storage while having the camera inserted. So that’s one thing you only have so much space to store photos and video, but I mean these are tiny little things, less than a megabyte each.

You can fit like two or three photos in a megabyte depending on your compression. But here why is it saying out of memory just for rotating an image?

Now it’s working now. So yeah, really not a lot to do here. I mean, you can zoom in and get some details of your image, that’s nice. But most of the actual image, editing, editing like color correction and brightness contrast, saturation all that.

That’s gonna be happening on the PC side of things. And you can also leave little audio messages to go along and narrate your photos. So look at this degum car. Look at this degum car. Really, considering the other options in 2003, I mean, sure you could buy a much better standalone digital camera but this being as small as it was and you had a cool screen and everything if you already had a PDA, I totally understand the appeal.

And of course, really the only other comparison would have been like cell phone cameras. But those had not been a thing for very long in 2003, when this came out, I think like a year here in the U.S. and even those were a megapixel less, like 0.3 megapixel. And didn’t do a lot of the things that this could. especially not with as big of a screen. 

Well, I suppose that is pretty much it for this piece of Odd ware for this video. The HP Mobile Camera, the Photo smart, little thingies is just a delightful piece of early 2000s tech in my mind, even though it was very quickly obsoleted by all kinds of other alternatives. And especially cell phone cameras that started to really take off the next year or two.

But for a very short period in time this was one of the coolest things out there. From what I remember, and I just thought this was so awesome and I wish I could have had a PDA for one. But also justified the cost, $150 for just one little camera add on to an already expensive device. I mean 150 was what the camera that I had in 2004 costs brand new and that was like 10 times better than this. So, that’s not really the point though if you already had a PDA or you just were someone that could afford it then why not?

This is such a cool little alternative to having a separate digital camera and a PDA that you’d carry around, could mix them together with mixed results. Is just one of those things that made PDAs, which are already one of the coolest mobile devices around back then even cooler. And I think it’s still a cool so yeah.