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June 7, 2006 – Prompted by a recall notice from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, HP issued a firmware update yesterday for its Photosmart R707 after an incident occurred in which a non-rechargeable battery caught fire. The version 2.00.24 firmware update "prevents the camera from applying a charge to a non-rechargeable battery" to keep them from over-heating. The update also improves other aspects of the R707.
Besides fixing the safety issue concerning the battery, the version 2.00.24 firmware improves the quality of the TV display when in the slide show mode. It also fixes issues with SD cards to prevent corrupting files and transferring problems between the camera and computers.
The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission reported one incident of a battery over-heating and catching fire. The HP R707 camera was damaged along with the docking station. The commission reported that this caused minor smoke damage to the room, but there were no injuries.
Because of this incident, the commission issued a recall that affects 224,000 HP Photosmart R707 digital cameras in the United States. There are 679,000 of those models worldwide. According to the commission’s statement, "The digital camera can cause certain non-rechargeable batteries, such as the Duracell CP-1, to overheat when the camera is connected to an AC adaptor or docking station, posing a fire hazard."
The 5.1-megapixel HP Photosmart R707 was announced in February 2004 and offered basic features like a 3x optical zoom lens and 1.5-inch LCD screen. The camera is equipped with 10 exposure modes and can snap pictures as fast as 3 frames per second. The R707 can record movies with 320 x 240 pixels at a rate of 30 fps. This model comes with a rechargeable lithium-ion battery.
The firmware update can be obtained here: