 Great bit of kit! |
| Review Date: October 8, 2009 |
| Reviewer: chesebrgr, |
This camera is great! If you've used a digicam before then you probably won't even need the instruction manual (supplied on CD, but with a printed Quick Start manual). It looks really smart and is pretty small (only a little larger than my mobile phone). I did buy this mainly for the front screen which is a great feature for me because I take a lot of self-portraits on holiday - they always seem to have a head chopped off or an arm in the picture or a weird expression on my face. But now I've got the camera, that is only one of the fantastic things about it! The main screen is absolutely awesome. Really large and looks very nice. The touch operation is great, easy to use and intuitive. Even if you don't know what an icon or option means, just hold your finger over it and it gives a text description.
The pics come out great and the HD video is really good too. The face tracking and blink detection are brilliant. There are so many options that you'll always find a suitable one for the situation, again just hold your finger over each icon and it describes it in plain English.
A few negative points... as you can see from the minor nature of these, if that's all that's wrong with it, then it must really be good!
* The USB cable is proprietary. Why oh why can't it be a standard one? It means that I have yet another cable to keep track of and carry around. Also the cable is only about 18 inches long, unless you've got a USB extension cable you'll have to put the camera very close to the PC when it's connected, or to the power socket when it's charging. But the power plug it comes with is great, it is basically a 3-pin plug with a USB socket on top. So I'll be able to use it to charge all my other USB-only gadgets too, that I previously could only charge from a PC!
* The tripod attachment is not below the camera's centre of gravity. This means that when I put it on my mini tripod, I have to adjust the legs so that it doesn't fall over. It's a bit precarious and on bumpy ground it could prove a problem. Annoying, but I can live with it.
* The screen has a widescreen aspect ratio (16:9), but the 12MP resolution is 4000 x 3000 (4:3). So when you shoot at the maximum resolution (and whats the point having it otherwise?), you get black bars at the sides of the screen. If you drop the resolution to 9MP widescreen, then you see how good the screen can really be. It's still great at 12MP, but feels like some of the screen is wasted.
Those are the only drawbacks I've spotted so far, and they're all minor. Overall it is a GREAT camera!
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Intuitive and fun
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| Review Date: October 24, 2009 |
| Reviewer: Mrs. S. C. Shipman, Mid Wales, UK |
This is a great camera with lots of really useful features. It's fun to use and the pictures I've taken look good. The camera looks cool too - it's slim and sleek and I love the purple colour choice :) The back screen is big and fab, and being a touch screen is easy and fun to use. The front screen, though a little gimmicky, is actually really useful for self portraits, and group photos with yourself in the shot, although I found that sometimes it was hard to activate it by tapping and took a few taps.
The camera is really easy to use and is very intuitive. All the settings can be found using the touch screen and if you're not sure what each of them are you can hold your finger on them and an explanation appears. The user manual comes on a CD and is a useful reference, but not needed that much as it's so easy to use. I went from getting it out of the box to taking pictures very quickly and I appreciated the fact that the battery didn't need to be charged up before I could have a play with it.
I enjoyed playing with the features such as the face recognition and the way it can automatically take a photo when the person smiles. Great fun! Other fun things are the photo editing you can do on the camera such as making pictures black & white, adding snow (!), and cropping. Usefully when you do edit photos it saves them as a new photo so you get to keep the original as well.
I've tried some close up photography using the scene selector set to close up, and found great results with that. The square that is green when in focus or red when not is a clear guide to whether you're getting it right or not. I've also taken landscape photos and portraits and all look good. The zoom is also a really useful function. I'm not an expert photographer, just a snapper, but my photos have come out looking great.
The camera comes with Intelli-studio which is used when you plug the camera into your PC. This is a useful tool and includes mechanisms for uploading your photos to Flickr. I have had some difficulty in uploading multiple photos to Flickr though - it only seems to upload the first one. I did find it a little strange that this software appears to be on the camera itself and is not installed on my PC. So if you don't have the camera plugged in you can use the software to look at the photos you've transferred onto your PC.
It comes with an A/V cable which I haven't yet tried, a USB cable (quite short, but fine) and a charging plug which the USB cable plugs into. It doesn't come with a micro SD card (which it uses) which I found a little disappointing as I had to get one before I could take more than a few pictures. This was clearly mentioned on the description though so I should have known!
Overall, I am really happy with the camera and any negatives I've mentioned are far outwayed by the positives - hence the 5 stars :) |
Designed by clever people, for everyday people
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| Review Date: November 3, 2009 |
| Reviewer: Tom Douglas, Mid-Atlantic |
For too long digital cameras have been about two things - size and megapixels. For a while both mattered, but pocket cameras really have been pocket cameras for a few years now, and once megapixels went above 6, it was only an issue for those with high levels of testosterone.
What should really matter these days, for the vast majority of potential camera buyers, is usability, and this camera has it in spades.
Samsung did what electronics companies rarely do - they sent the design team out into the world to watch how real people take real photographs. The answer, which all of us could have told them for the price of a glass of merlot, is that most photos are snapshots, are taken quickly due to our short attention spans, and need to be good enough to print or post on facebook. We don't want to ever have to worry about battery life, or focusing, or framing.
Well, credit to Samsung, because not only did they figure out what we need, they then went and produced it.
This camera has an intuitive touch-screen interface, takes photos for you, stops you from being a plank and taking the wrong shot and keeps the kids looking at the camera long enough to get a shot taken.
It is a camera for the 98% of people who just want a camera that takes phones, rather than those who worry about alpha levels, whatever they might be.
It is lightweight, slim, easy to use and robust.
A couple of minor negatives:
- it has a non-standard USB cable
- the manual is on CD, rather than printed
- unless you set it otherwise, it will take widescreen photos; try printing those at a photo booth!
Minor points, and they do little to undermine a truly user-oriented product. Well done Samsung for putting the user in charge of the technology.
Five stars. |
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