This week I took a look at some options for people who want to get rid of old electronics, one way or another. The good news is that there are a handful of Web sites that make it easy to do this — and some of them may even pay you for your old products. The bad news is that you’ll likely receive only a fraction of what you originally paid, especially if you waited a while to get rid of it.

Some sites, like Gazelle.com and VenJuvo.com, offer cash for your items and/or will recycle products. Another site, TechForward.com, lets people pay a fee to “lock in” a value for how much the site promises to pay for the product in the future. MyBoneYard.com accepts only laptops, desktop PCs, cellphones and flat-panel monitors, and gives Visa (V) gift cards rather than cash.

I was surprised to receive significantly different value offers from Gazelle and VenJuvo when trying to sell the exact same products on each site. In one instance, VenJuvo offered me $30 more than Gazelle for a digital camera; another time, I got $15 more from Gazelle for an old Apple (AAPL) iPod. It’s worth the extra step to shop around at more than one of these sites before getting rid of something.

Both ask a few questions about the item, including its condition and whether or not it still has the accessories that originally came with it. Gazelle determines a product’s value using retail — think Amazon (AMZN) and eBay (EBAY) — and wholesale channels; VenJuvo uses similar criteria and also looks at competitors’ prices.

If you worry about someone stealing your digital data, you’ll likely not feel comfortable dropping something in the mail that’s chock full of personal information, especially if it no longer powers on to allow the owner to wipe this information.

Both Gazelle and VenJuvo accept at least some types of digital cameras, laptops, MP3 players, GPS devices, camcorders and gaming consoles. Gazelle also accepts cellphones. But they don’t take everything. Gazelle doesn’t take LCD TVs and VenJuvo doesn’t accept satellite radios and portable hard drives or any smartphones or cellphones other than the iPhone; neither accepts desktop PCs.

I took the closest look at newly released Gazelle, owned by Second Rotation Inc., and walked through the simple start-to-finish process of selling a gadget and receiving money from the site. After pulling up the site, people can find their product and its value by choosing from a list of nine categories or by typing some part of the product’s name into a search box.

I sold Gazelle a first-generation iPod Mini with four gigabytes of memory for which my boss paid $249 in 2004. I answered a few questions about the product: Yes, it still powered on; no, I didn’t have the original AC adapter, manuals or software installation CD, and it was in “excellent” condition, according to my assessment. Gazelle placed its value at $25.

At this step, I opted to add the iPod to my box and check out, but users can also add other items to a box, including electronics for recycling. Gazelle’s policy is that it pays 100% of shipping costs for any box shipped to the company, so long as there’s at least one item in the box worth $1. Eighty percent of transactions qualify for a free box; the rest can be sent with printed-out prepaid shipping labels, but you must find packaging.

Gazelle lets users receive payments via a mailed, paper check or using PayPal; money is received either way within five business days. People can also donate their money to one of 23 causes, including the American Red Cross and World Vision. I opted for PayPal, and the $25 amount was deposited shortly after Gazelle received the iPod.

I sent the old iPod to Gazelle in a brightly colored, empty box that arrives at a customer’s door a few days after he or she sells the device to Gazelle. I secured the old iPod in the box using balled up paper, and sealed it with packing tape. A prepaid shipping label was already stuck to it, and I needed only drop it off at UPS.

If Gazelle receives a product and decides that it isn’t worth what you said it was — either more or less — and you’d rather not sell, the company will ship the product back, free of charge. But while Gazelle’s site guarantees users that they’ll receive their money, and that personal data are safe with the company, no money-back guarantee is offered.

Gazelle hopes to calm nerves by posting detailed instructions on the site about how to wipe a device of all private information. But the company hasn’t yet done this, and numerous users will remain skeptical even with such instructions.

I also poked around on VenJuvo Inc.’s Web site of the same name, www.VenJuvo.com, which is derived from two Greek words meaning “support, assist and delight sellers,” according to the company. This site, too, buys products back from people, though it pays via check, PayPal or Kmart (SHLD) gift card. Users fill out similarly simple questionnaires on each product to help assess value. Unlike Gazelle’s style of mailing boxes to users, VenJuvo gives users only prepaid shipping labels to print out and stick on a box that the customer must supply.

One notable difference between the sites is Gazelle’s broader range of products. In the case of digital cameras, for example, Gazelle accepts 80 brands while VenJuvo takes only Canon (CAJ), Sony (SNE), Olympus and Kodak (EK). Unlike with Gazelle, if you send VenJuvo a product that isn’t worth what you said it was, the company won’t return the product free-of-charge; instead, it will charge you for shipping.

If users choose to receive a gift card, they get a 10% added value. While VenJuvo doesn’t let people donate a product’s value to a cause, it will add this feature next week and will include different causes (like Ronald McDonald House and Big Brothers Big Sisters) than those found on Gazelle.

Unlike Gazelle, VenJuvo will always take items for recycling and will pay for the shipping, regardless of whether you traded something in for a value.

A useful resource for general electronics recycling is the Consumer Electronics Association Web site, www.MyGreenElectronics.org, which locates nearby electronics-recycling centers according to ZIP Code. And almost every computer manufacturer has a recycling program in place; some will even recycle computers that aren’t their own brand.

One way or another, it’s time to clean out the old junk drawer. Just be sure to do some comparison shopping if you want money for your old products.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

It’s a good time to be in the market for such a camera. According to research from Olympus, unit sales for these gizmos has grown about 30% in the past two years, while dollar sales grew at about half that rate, indicating declining prices and improved technology. In fact, digital-camera prices have dropped an average of $30 over the past 12 months.

This guide offers an overview of the basics that you’ll need to know when buying a digital camera. It also explains many of the fancy features that are popping up on these devices, such as facial recognition — a camera’s ability to detect when faces are being captured in photos, thus appropriately adjusting exposure, focus and flash. This guide isn’t geared toward hobbyists, but rather toward average users who want good quality photos but don’t want to struggle with confusing product specs and promotions.

Point and Shoot, or Flaunt and Pocket

As you begin looking for a camera, selecting a preferred size and shape will help narrow your choices. Like iPods and cellphones, stylish pocket cameras are fashionable accessories; some come in shades like Precious Rose or Noble Blue. These pocket models, designed with emphasis on small size, are as easy to carry as they are to use for taking good photos: most offer seven or eight megapixels each, a 3x or better optical zoom lens and a stunning viewing screen. Good examples include Sony Corp.’s $400 Cyber-shot DSC-T100 or Nikon Inc.’s $300 Coolpix S50.

If you don’t mind sacrificing style for a camera that’s sturdier in your hand but bulkier in your purse, point-and-shoot models will be more your speed. On average, these cost less than their showy cousins. They’re more likely to have protruding zoom lenses that don’t collapse entirely into the camera body and often feature larger buttons. More point-and-shoots offer optical viewfinders, which have become practically extinct on pocket digicams where real estate is scarce. Examples of point-and-shoots with optical viewfinders include Eastman Kodak Co.’s EasyShare C653 and Canon Inc.’s PowerShot A460-both cost $130.

A third category of digital cameras, the single-lens reflex or SLR, continues to be marketed to regular consumers rather than to the photography enthusiasts for whom they were originally intended. SLR prices have dropped a couple of hundred dollars in the past year, but many models still start around $800 and come with detachable lenses and flashes. Average users can steer clear of SLR cameras.

Megapixels

Most cameras today offer anywhere between six and 10 megapixels; cameras with four megapixels or fewer are rather rare. But while higher megapixel counts are easy to find for less money, such as Hewlett-Packard Co.’s $300 PhotoSmart R967 with 10 megapixels, such intense resolution is really only necessary if you plan to heavily edit or blow up your photographs for jumbo prints, which most people won’t be doing.

Zoom Confusion

While most camera makers offer clearer marketing strategies now than a year or so ago, some still try to dupe consumers by listing only a camera’s total zoom — the optical and digital zoom multiplied together to create a larger, more impressive number. The truth lies in optical zoom, an enhancement made by a physically moving lens, not digital zoom, which instead magnifies a photo using the camera’s digital circuitry.

This year, companies also created a new category for cameras with 10x or 12x optical-zoom lenses — these are often referred to as high zoom digital cameras. In reality, a camera with about a 4x optical zoom is sufficient for most people.

Facial Recognition

This category is likely to become more popular. Facial recognition makes the camera smart enough to recognize that the subject contains a face and must be captured with the correct balance of color and lighting. Sony’s Cyber-shot G1 can detect up to eight faces in one image; Canon’s technology can detect up to nine per shot.

Image Stabilization

Image stabilization, or IS, was once only available in high-end SLR cameras. Now, almost all of the top-name consumer digicams offer this because without optical viewfinders, users must shakily hold cameras out to look through viewing screens. Referred to as antishake or vibration reduction by some manufacturers, there are three kinds of IS: optical and mechanical image stabilization, which physically steady a camera even when your hand is shaking, or digital image stabilization, which can improve a shot when the photographed subject is moving.

Some cameras, like the $250 Olympus Stylus 760, offer dual IS. This means the camera is equipped with both digital and mechanical or optical image stabilization, the best of both worlds. If you’ll be using a camera specifically for shots of moving objects, digital IS will work.

Storage — on Your Camera or on a Web Site

The cost of memory cards has dropped by half compared with last year: one-gigabyte memory cards now only cost about $30, and $50 two-gigabyte cards are even more popular thanks to people who want to record videos for uploading and sharing on Web sites. Data can be transferred from these cards by plugging them into a computer using an adapter or a card slot, or cameras can be connected to PCs with USB cords.

Now, Kodak, Nikon and Sony offer cameras with wireless Internet connection capabilities, or Wi-Fi. This allows you to take pictures and, when connected to a Wi-Fi hotspot, upload them directly to a Web site for sharing or storing, saving you the step of transferring the images to a computer first. These cameras are the $200 EasyShare One from Kodak, Nikon’s $350 Coolpix S50c and Sony’s $600 Cyber-shot DSC-G1.

Although using Wi-Fi in a digital camera is a smart idea, it could be a real drain on your camera’s battery. Wi-Fi is by no means a necessary feature, but some people will find it a useful add-on.

Battery Tips

Camera battery life can be affected by new features like extra-large screens — especially those that can play slide shows of your photographs — built-in Wi-Fi and even in-camera editing, which requires your camera and LCD screen to be on for longer periods. If you rarely take shots indoors, your flash will likely be used less, which might help your camera’s battery life. A spare battery is useful, and some cameras will work with drugstore batteries for the sake of convenience.

In-Camera Editing

The large, bright LCD viewing screens on cameras — some of which measure up to three inches or even three and a half inches diagonally — encourage everyday photogs to share their shots. To make even these images look better, camera manufacturers are incorporating in-camera editing for fixing mistakes on the spot, without a computer.

Cameras from all of the major manufacturers now enable red-eye fixes either as the photo is captured or after the fact. Companies such as Kodak offer zooming, cropping and panoramic shot stitching, while H-P cameras offer touch-ups like blemish-removing and ways to make a subject look slimmer.

* * *

The digital camera category is exciting right now, as these portable devices become more like computers thanks to in-camera editing, greater memory and built-in Wi-Fi. But remember that your photos come first, no matter how many bells and whistles are added to a camera.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

• Email: MossbergSolution@wsj.com

Compact photo printers, the toaster-shaped gadgets made popular by Hewlett-Packard a few years back, can still wow a crowd. They use special photo paper — usually of the 4×6 variety; can accept most digital camera memory cards; and produce beautiful prints right on the spot, making their owners the hits of parties and family gatherings.

These printers are also well-liked because of their ability to work independent of a computer: just plug in your digital camera’s USB cable or a memory card and press print. But because most of these printers have typically lacked good editing options, users were still returning to their computers to make adjustments on important images.

This week we tested three of the newest compact photo printers from HP, Epson and Canon that include features that make them more like mini-computers all their own, including extensive editing options and even internal memory and a CD burner in the HP and Epson, respectively.

But with these new features come higher prices. The $200 Canon Pixma mini260, $250 HP Photosmart A716 and $300 Epson PictureMate Flash cost significantly more than the mini-printers we reviewed almost two years ago. Back then, the most expensive of the three compact photo printers we tested was $200.

We’ve been printing directly from memory cards plugged into these three printers for the past week to see if their higher prices were delivering better results. Overall, we were impressed by the quality of the prints. We were also pleased, though not surprised, to find that the cost of paper and ink supplies has dropped about 10 cents per print, overall. The most inexpensive supply pack, from Epson, offers prints for 27 cents apiece, though this is still about 12 cents more than Kodak Gallery’s online store.

We printed photos taken with two different digital cameras, as well as photos captured on a cellphone’s 1.3-megapixel camera. Neither of the cameras was made by the makers of the printers.

We found the Epson’s prints to be the best overall, even though they cost the least. The Epson produced sharp images with rich, vibrant colors that churned out in just 45 seconds each, the fastest time of the three. And, though we had to do some in-printer editing to produce a red-eye-free image of a friend with the Epson, the final version of this photo also looked good. The Epson is larger and costlier than the others, but the company makes a less expensive, smaller model with the same picture-printing features and quality.

The HP more easily eliminated red-eye with its Photo Fix button, but its other prints looked somewhat less vivid than the Epson’s. And at a speed of two minutes per image, we grew tired of waiting for these prints. The Canon’s images looked sharp, but were slightly yellow in tone when lined up side-by-side with the other prints. They took about a minute each to print.

All three of these compact photo printers have built-in handles for portability, 2.5-inch viewing screens to preview images and optional sold-separately batteries for cordless use.

The $250 HP Photosmart A716 looks much like its predecessors: white and toaster-shaped with accessible memory card slots and a USB port on the front side. But this printer comes with four gigabytes of internal memory, enough to hold up to 4,000 pictures according to HP. We easily saved various images to the HP Photosmart’s memory by pressing a Save button on the printer’s top side.

One advantage to HP’s internal memory: at a party or family gathering, you wouldn’t have to rush to print out as many images as possible before people taking pictures left with their cameras or memory cards. Instead, you could just save the images onto the printer for later. For $70 less, HP sells the Photosmart A616 — the same printer without internal memory.

The HP Photosmart A716 really shines in the editing department, offering image improvement options that truly made a difference. But we weren’t able to easily view multiple photos at once on its screen — this view can only be seen by selecting Print Index View, which is buried four steps deep in a menu. In addition to 4×6 photos, you can also print 5×7s using the A716.

Epson’s $300 PictureMate Flash stands higher than the HP and Canon printers, partially due to the CD burner that is built into its base. This feature lets you copy digital photos onto CDs, which can then be handed out in addition to, or instead of, prints. You can also print an index of the images that are being copied onto the CD.

We quickly burned 50 digital shots from our SecureDigital memory card onto a CD; when slipped into our computer the CD’s images appeared, ready for editing, emailing or Web posting. Epson also sells its PictureMate Snap — the same printer without the burner — for $100 less.

The Epson PictureMate Flash has colorful buttons that are well labeled and easy to understand, including a smart Display button that easily switched our screen’s view from full-screen to thumbnail. At 6.6 pounds, this compact printer weighs in as the heaviest of the bunch.

When we pulled the $200 Canon Pixma mini260 out of its box, we wondered how it would transform into a printer. But after a few clever fold-backs and compartment openings, we were in business. This printer’s most useful button is a round navigational dial, like that used by Canon in its digital cameras. The mini260, like the Epson, easily switches from one image view to the next using a soft key below the viewing screen.

But even with the navigational dial, we found that using the Canon Pixma was more laborious than operating the other two. For one thing, inserting a memory card into its side slot didn’t trigger the printer to automatically pull up the images. We had to first open another menu to see our photos. And a screen filled with options like paper size, type and print quality had to be bypassed before each printout. The other printers smartly hide these settings deeper within their menus.

A host of editing options are offered in the Canon, but even with all of these settings turned on or adjusted for the best results, edited pictures still weren’t as good as those from the HP or Epson. The red-eye in one image, for example, wasn’t fully removed even after we turned on red-eye correction.

In the end, we liked the $300 Epson PictureMate Flash best. If its price tag makes you wince, try the $200 PictureMate Snap, which doesn’t include the CD burner. In our tests, the Epson produced the best prints for the least amount of money in the fastest time per photo. Consumers who are in the market for a portable photo printer won’t be disappointed by this new gadget.

Write to Walter S. Mossberg at walt.mossberg@wsj.com and Katherine Boehret at katie.boehret@wsj.com

For the blind and visually impaired, technology has been helpful in many ways. Software can dictate the text on a computer screen, and advancements in voice recognition have made it possible to navigate a computer more easily.

But, for reading printed documents, like magazines, menus and mail, many blind and visually impaired people must still rely on other people to read to them, or must use large, deskbound reading machines that do nothing to allow reading while on the go. These dependencies are affecting more and more people, as aging Boomers confront diseases like macular degeneration and the effects of diabetes on eyesight.

The $3,495 Kurzweil-National Federation of the Blind Reader takes digital pictures of text and reads them out loud. www.knfbreader.com.

Starting this month, there’s a new portable gadget for the blind that permits them to “read” printed documents anywhere, at home or away, without the aid of sighted people. This gadget takes a digital picture of a page of text, and then reads it aloud to the blind person, either through a speaker or through earphones. It’s called the Kurzweil-National Federation of the Blind Reader, and we’ve been testing it.

We aren’t blind or visually impaired, so we can’t presume to speak for people who are. But we do know gadgets, and we were able to test the new Reader on different printed documents to see how well it did.

Our verdict: The K-NFB Reader was remarkably effective on a wide variety of documents, and would be a real boon to anyone who is blind or has seriously failing eyesight. It isn’t perfect — it can get confused by highly stylized text, or by illustrations embedded in text, for instance. It’s a bit bulky. And, at $3,495, it’s quite expensive. But it works.

The Kurzweil-National Federation of the Blind Reader was released on July 1. It is the result of a collaboration between the Kurzweil Foundation and the NFB, and it might be the closest a blind person can get to reading without using Braille.

The K-NFB Reader consists of two digital devices, connected electronically and surrounded by a synthetic case, plus special software that performs the scanning and reading aloud.

It is made up of a personal digital assistant, or PDA, stuck to a digital camera. The camera captures the image of a document, then sends that image to the PDA, which uses software to translate and read aloud the document in just 30 seconds.

We tested this device with magazine and newspaper articles, printed Microsoft Word documents, bills, junk mail and books. The results were impressive, and with a little patience and practice, we think the K-NFB Reader can be truly liberating for the blind. But it definitely takes some getting used to.

The reader consists of two digital devices, connected electronically and surrounded by a synthetic case.

It’s obvious that this reader can get even smaller and better in the coming years. The foundation and the federation are already looking into whether the reader’s functionality can be replicated on a cellphone with a built-in camera.

The digital camera used in this first version of the reader is a Canon SD20, which goes for about $200 online; the PDA is a lesser known product here in the U.S. — the Fujitsu-Siemens LOOX N560, priced at around $600 on the Web. But the total cost for the K-NFB Reader is a stunning $3,495.

The companies explain that this is the list price and that the software makes up a huge chunk of the cost. We certainly can’t put a price on a blind person’s new ability to “read,” but this seemed a little steep to us.

The PDA and camera are directly connected electronically (no cable is needed) and its casing covers the slots for your camera battery and PDA SD card. Altogether, the Reader only weighs about 12 ounces, making it portable for everyday use.

The included 1-gigabyte memory card stays in the PDA, not the camera, and is estimated to hold about 900 pages of documents. The camera battery and PDA battery must each be charged; the NFB estimates the camera battery will last for about 100 images and the PDA battery for about six hours of normal use.

The PDA has a large, 3.5-inch screen, which, logically, never displays anything as you use the device. Below the screen, four buttons surround four directional up, down, left and right buttons; these surround one center select button. The Reader’s directions instructed us to treat the four outer buttons as F1, F2, F3 and F4, though they aren’t labeled as such.

To turn on the device, you press F1 and then F2. Pressing the F2 button lets you scroll through three modes: User Settings, Shooting Mode and Document Reader, each with its own menus. The device speaks the name of each function and menu as you select them, so a blind person knows what he or she is doing. The device also comes with directions in Braille and regular print, and they were pretty straightforward.

The Reader can be set in one of two modes for reading: books, articles and labels; or bills and memos. We kept ours in the former category for most of our testing.

We started off testing the Reader with a simple Word document. We followed instructions, holding the device up near our eyes. Pressing the up arrow gave us a “field of view report,” or an audible description of what the camera saw on the table in front of us, like “Left, right and bottom edges visible.” The best view description is announced as, “Portrait view” or “Landscape view,” and you’ll want to press the down arrow to capture your image as soon as you hear this.

The reader can be set in different modes: books, articles and labels; or bills and memos.

It takes a few tries to get a hang of how to position the Reader. But thanks to the detailed description, you can usually figure out which way to move the Reader to view the document at the best angle.

When we pressed the down arrow to take a picture, a voice announced “Taking picture,” “Preprocessing picture,” and then “Processing image.” If the device is idle for more than three minutes (by default), it will announce, “Auto shutdown is turning the system off, goodbye.”

After 30 seconds of processing, the device’s voice started reading the text from our Word document without a problem. However, it had trouble reading articles that started with an extra-large, graphical first letter, a style found in many magazines and newspapers (like this column). For example, if the first word in a story was “Walt,” the Reader would say, “W” and “alt,” pronouncing the “W” and “alt” as two separate words. Sometimes it would skip the large first letter.

Articles that were written in column form were handled without much problem; when the Reader got to the bottom of one column, it started at the top of the next. But illustrations positioned in the center of a block of text posed a problem; in one case, the Reader read a cartoon illustrator’s signature, in another, it interpreted squiggles in the drawing as apostrophes or dashes or even letters.

When used for a page in a hardcover book, our Reader did a good job, though we doubt anyone would use this for hundreds of pages.

Katie tried the reader on a box of over-the-counter pills to see if it might accurately identify its contents, and the directions, for a blind person. The gadget was able to read smaller print, such as the “Just one tablet per dose” warning. But the largest text on the box — the product’s name — wasn’t recognized, nor was the name of its manufacturer. Both words were written in more stylized text, which we guess gave the Reader trouble.

One downside of this first version is that the reader’s voice is robotic and flat, with little or no inflection, but the Kurzweil Foundation notes that many blind people are used to this robotic voice because it has been used on other products in the past. Even when the reader captured all of the words, it sometimes pronounced them strangely, or incorrectly, such as pronouncing “reading” as “redding” and “cool” as “see all.”

On Tuesday, a new version of the software will allow users to choose a more human-sounding playback voice. We tested this, but didn’t find it to be a big improvement. It’s still pretty robotic.

Documents can be saved on your Reader according to the current date, and special audio files called Voice Notes can be used to tag each document. We tried this and easily recorded a Voice Note describing one of our documents, later linking the note to our document by pressing F3.

If you take the time to learn how to use the Kurzweil-National Federation of the Blind Reader, we think you’ll be very pleased with the results. This gadget, though expensive, is simple to use and works quickly. It also does a good job of explaining its processes to the user, so he or she knows what is happening on the gadget at all times.

For someone who can’t see, the K-NFB Reader might offer a huge lifestyle change.

• Email: MossbergSolution@wsj.com.

So, most digital photos never get printed, and many of those that do are produced at kiosks in retail stores, and ordered from online photo services like Shutterfly and Kodak’s EasyShare Gallery. That’s bad news for Hewlett-Packard Co., the leader in home printers, which makes a lot of money selling ink and paper to consumers. Now, H-P has come up with a new printer design for homes that it hopes will entice consumers to do more of their own printing.

This week, my assistant Katie Boehret and I reviewed H-P’s speedy new $199 Photosmart 8250 Photo Printer, a product that the company hopes will change the way you think about printing photos at home. In its fastest mode, the company boasts, the 8250 can churn out a snapshot-sized 4×6 photo in just 14 seconds and all-black-print text pages at 32 per minute — much faster than its 20 color or black-print page-per-minute claims for older home inkjets. Our tests showed the new model to be very fast, but not quite as speedy as H-P’s claims imply.

In addition to its speed, the Photosmart 8250 also boasts a new type of water-fast ink and a new ink-cartridge system for home printers. Instead of lumping all of the printer’s colors together in one large cartridge, this printer stores each of its six inks in a separate cartridge. That way, if you use a lot of one color — say lots of green, taking pictures of baseball games — you only need to replace one color when you run out, not all of the others, which still may be in good supply.

These new cartridges cost about $10 for each of the five colors, and $18 for the solo black cartridge, which holds about twice as much ink as any one color. By contrast, on H-P’s older printers, the single color cartridge can cost as much as $35, and the black cartridge about $30.

The longevity of these new individual tanks varies per color and depending on what is being printed. H-P estimates that with typical pages of mixed text and graphics, the new black cartridge will print 480 pages, and color cartridges range between 350 and 490 pages. The cartridges in the old system last for 450 color and 450 black pages.

This idea of individual ink tanks is nothing new. Some H-P rivals, such as Epson and Canon, have relied on that type of design for years, and H-P itself has sold inkjets for business with individual ink tanks. But the company claims its new home system is engineered to use more of the ink inside each tank before it requires replacement, cutting down on waste.

To give us some perspective on H-P’s more traditional printer cartridges and speeds, we also tested the 8250’s year-old predecessor — the $149.99 Photosmart 8150 Photo Printer. The 8150 works with the old cartridge system — using just two larger cartridges at a time.

These two silver printers are similar in appearance — each is designed with a useful four-card media-card reader and a 2.5-inch color LCD screen centered on its top side. This combination of features makes both printers useable without attaching to a Mac or Windows PC; the LCD serves as a preview panel for images on your memory card, thus allowing you to zoom, lighten, or remove red eye in photos before printing.

But as we easily set up these two printers, we took note of how, under the hood, they appear rather different from one another. The older 8150’s two large cartridges have built-in printheads that slide from side to side during printing, then over to the right side for reloading and resting.

Under the 8250’s lid, we took a bit more time to snap each of its six cartridges into place. This rainbow of yellow, light and regular magenta, light and regular cyan and black cartridges fit smack in the center of the printer’s guts.

These cartridges differ from the older type in that they are separate from the printhead, the device that moves left to right while spitting color onto a page. Each container of color stays in place, and is connected to the moving printhead through its own tube. H-P says this system enables faster printing while also making it possible to replace just one color at a time.

Katie and I tested the 8250 for speed and quality by printing full-page color photos, 4×6 color photos, color Microsoft Word documents and black text-only Word documents. We sent documents to each printer from its corresponding computer, as well as directly from an inserted memory card. We ran the same tests on the 8150, just to get an understanding of how much faster the 8250 was, and how — if at all — the quality differed. Our results showed the 8250 to be much faster, but we couldn’t detect any quality difference. Both the old and new models produced very good, but unexceptional, prints.

Unsurprisingly, the 8250’s fastest results came from printing the color and black Word documents, each of which was finished in just 10 seconds, about 13 seconds faster than the 8150. Printing 4×6 color photos took 32 seconds on the 8250, about a minute less than on the 8150. And it took about eight more seconds to print a full-page photo on the 8250. The full-page photo on the 8150 took around four minutes.

H-P is selling new “Advanced” photo paper to use with its new ink. The company claims that the combination of paper and ink will lead to water-fast prints that dry faster, and that the new paper also contributes to faster print times, which we found to be true. We used a sheet of HP Premium Plus Photo Paper instead of the HP Advanced Photo Paper to print a 4×6 on the 8250, and it took 70 seconds, over twice as long.

H-P’s fastest result — the 14 second 4×6 photo — is achieved by printing on Advanced Photo Paper, in fast-draft mode with borders, and H-P times the print according to the second page out, after the printheads are already in place for printing. By contrast, our tests attempt to approximate real life. We start timing when the print button is pressed and count the first page out.

Occasionally, the 8250 performed some noisy “device maintenance,” according to the message on the LCD screen. H-P explained that this is the printer’s way of recycling the ink it uses to clean its printhead, whereas many printers clean printheads using ink, but never re-use that ink.

The individual ink cartridges might be enough to sway you into buying the 8250, especially if you print items with certain colors regularly — like documents with your company’s all-red logo. You might also be drawn to its speed, which had us hooked, but its quality, while good, wasn’t anything out of the ordinary.

With reporting by Katherine Boehret

Write to Walter S. Mossberg at mossberg@wsj.com

And the camera makers keep turning out attractive new pocket digital models. Over this past Memorial Day weekend, my assistant Katie Boehret and I tested five of the newest pocket digital cameras from Nikon, Fujifilm, Kodak, Canon and Konica Minolta. These cameras range in price from $349 to $499; all weigh six ounces or less, not counting their batteries; and all are an inch or less thick. (Except for the Konica Minolta and Canon, these are official list prices; buyers may be able to find the cameras for less.)

Each of these cameras has a maximum resolution of about five megapixels, except for the Canon, which is $100 more than any of the others, and can capture up to 7.1-megapixel images. Unless you do very heavy editing of photos, or make prints larger than 8×10’s, five megapixels is more than enough for any casual photographer.

Zooming In

They all have the capability to record short video clips. And all have 3x optical zoom, which is sufficient for casual shooters. But only two of the five cameras — the Kodak and Canon — have lenses that physically protrude from the camera body. The others use internal zooming technology, which means that the camera face always remains flat, even when completely zoomed in on an object. All five use proprietary batteries and seemed able to sustain an average day of shooting.

Four of the five models, all except the Canon, have huge, 2.5-inch LCD screens on the back, up from the 2-inch or smaller screens common in pocket cameras only a year ago. But, to make room for the bigger screens, three of the five have omitted an essential feature, the optical viewfinder, which is a far better tool for framing a shot than the screen is.

Only the Canon and the Kodak have optical viewfinders. That means you can easily frame shots even when bright sunlight washes out the LCD screen, and your shots can be steadier than when you rely on the screen alone, which requires you to extend the camera away from your body.

In our tests, all of these cameras took rich, sharp pictures, indoors and out. You wouldn’t go wrong with any of them. But, because I consider optical viewfinders so important, I recommend the Canon or the Kodak. And of those two I lean toward the Kodak because it is $100 less, is thinner and lighter, and manages to combine both an optical viewfinder and the larger 2.5-inch screen. The Konica Minolta, which I have recommended in the past, is no longer my favorite because it has lost its optical viewfinder in its latest iteration.

Fujifilm FinePix Z1 List price: $399.95

The Kodak also benefits from being able to dock with the company’s snapshot printers and with nonprinting docks that work with Kodak’s EasyShare software to allow users to easily share pictures via email on a PC or Mac.

We should note that the Kodak that we tried out was a preproduction unit. In our tests, it was slower than the other cameras to ready itself to take the next shot. By contrast, the Canon seemed the fastest at shot-to-shot speed. But Kodak claims that the shot-to shot speed is much faster in production units.

The $400 Fujifilm FinePix Z1 caught our attention because of its sexy appearance. Instead of taking on the typical look of a digital camera, the front of the FinePix Z1 looks (in its closed state) like a simple black rectangle with silver-accented buttons and edges. A thin piece that covers the entire front side of the camera slides across to reveal the camera’s lens and flash, while simultaneously turning the camera on.

The Z1 measures just 0.7-inch wide, making it the slimmest of the five cameras that we tested. A generously sized 2.5-inch LCD viewing screen takes up most of the back side of the camera, but it lacks an optical viewfinder.

Focus Alert

Nikon Coolpix S1 List price: $379.95

We snapped photographs using the Z1 and found a few helpful features. An indicator lamp directly to the right of the LCD viewing screen blinked green when we held the shutter button halfway down, and then glowed steadily once the image was in focus, so we knew when to take the picture. The FinePix Z1 also is one of three cameras we reviewed that comes with a handy docking cradle for charging the camera’s battery and transferring its photos onto your computer.

The $380 Nikon Coolpix S1 also comes with a docking cradle, and it, too, earns points for its stylishly sleek appearance. Its most striking feature is how quietly it operates. When we pressed this silver camera’s “On/Off” button, a small metal circle instantly and almost noiselessly moved, revealing the camera’s lens like something out of a James Bond movie.

Lighten Up

When using the Nikon, we especially liked a feature built into the camera called D-Lighting, which allowed us to improve the lighting of a photograph after it was captured. We simply pressed the “OK” button while reviewing a captured image, and two small shots appeared on the screen — one that showed the image as it was, and one that showed how it would look after D-Lighting brightened the image, thus allowing us to choose to lighten it or not. We found that most of our pictures benefited from this in-camera editing process, especially shots that were taken indoors.

The buttons on the back of the Nikon proved a bit tough to operate. In keeping with the coolness of the camera, the Menu, Playback and Delete buttons are all tiny, smooth circles. But we found ourselves pushing them extra hard to get results, which was annoying. The Nikon lacks an optical viewfinder, forcing users to rely solely on its LCD screen for capturing photos.

Canon PowerShot SD500 Estimated street price: $499

The chunkiest of the cameras that we tested was the $500 Canon PowerShot SD500. But even though it weighed the most and was thicker than the rest that we tested, the SD500 is still a rather compact pocket camera.

We were impressed by the Canon’s quick start-up time, which seemed to be almost as fast as the 0.5-second start-up time of the Konica Minolta Dimage X60. And its mode dial — which many other Canon cameras also have — helps users easily switch between playback, video camera and photography modes.

The Canon offers a way to adjust color tones in photos by using a My Colors mode that allows you, for instance, to turn grass red or blue. But this seemed more of a gimmick than the Nikon’s genuinely useful D-Lighting feature.

And, unlike the stealthily quiet Nikon, the Canon seems to announce its presence with noise — its zoom lens whirs as it moves in and out, and special “click” sound effects can be heard whenever you take a picture.

The $400 Kodak EasyShare V550 combines its large screen and optical viewfinder in a slim, black matte body that has etched buttons on the top that light up blue, like the metal keypad on the iconic Motorola Razr cellphone.

Kodak EasyShare V550 List price: $399.95

It’s laced with touches of Kodak’s user-friendly approach, which we liked, including a blurry-picture alert and explanations of what picture-capturing mode you’re currently using (i.e. “Auto — use for general picture taking”). This camera also comes with a dock for charging the camera and transferring photos. This camera’s control buttons flank the left and right sides of its large LCD screen, and the optical viewfinder is oddly situated on the left side, which took a little getting used to.

Taking pictures with the Kodak was easy, and we liked the view screen better than any of the others, because it showed very rich colors. You can adjust the screen’s brightness by simply pressing the left or right arrows.

The last camera that we tested was the $350 Konica Minolta Dimage X60, the follow-up camera to the company’s Dimage X50, which is one of mine and Katie’s favorite digital cameras. The X50 had a 2-inch viewing screen, but still had an optical viewfinder. This new X60 has a 2.5-inch LCD screen but is the first Dimage X model we tested that ditches the viewfinder.

Trade-Offs

Konica Minolta Dimage X60 Estimated street price: $349.99

The Dimage X60 still has the same simple user interface that made its predecessor so popular, but because of the larger viewing screen, its buttons are much tinier. Its super-fast start-up time is a real boon for those who want to capture an image quickly. But, without the viewfinder, it’s no longer our top pick.

Overall, the quality of the images from all five cameras was impressive. Most of the colors seemed true to the actual subject, though the Konica Minolta’s images tended to have slightly rosier hues, which showed up in skin tones, and the Nikon had a somewhat yellow tint in some of our shots.

The Canon and Konica Minolta seemed to start up almost instantly, while the other cameras were a little more sluggish. But the shot-to-shot time for the Canon and Fujifilm cameras seemed to be the fastest overall.

There’s plenty to choose from in this crop of new pocket cameras, depending on your budget, tastes and needs. But the Kodak EasyShare V550 and the Canon PowerShot SD500 are the best of this lot, all in all.

With reporting by Katherine Boehret

Write to Walter S. Mossberg at mossberg@wsj.com