HP Photosmart 850 Reliability

Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.dcameras (More info?)

Hello folks. I am new to digital photography. I have only owned my
Photosmart 850 for a few weeks. It was on sale, and I wanted a camera with
a good optical zoom (8x). When the camera works, it does all I want, and
I'm happy with the image quality.

One thing that concerns me is that the camera seems a little flakey. I find
that I can easily confuse the camera and end up with a lock-up where the
camera just freezes. The only way to recover the situation is to remove &
re-insert the batteries. This can happen at any time. A colleague bought
the same camera at the same time. He has had such bad reliability problems
that he has sent his back to the supplier.

Is the 850 troublesome for anyone else out there? Are there any tricks to
improving the performance of these things?

Thanks,
Bill.