Top critical review
1.0 out of 5 starsNot an acceptable camera
Reviewed in the United States on July 16, 2011
To put this in context, we purchased this camera as one of a handful of point-and-shoots; we bought a Nikon D90 shortly before having our first child, which is a stellar DSLR, to add to an old Panasonic Lumix point-and-shoot that did take pretty good pictures, despite an excessively bright flash. After a couple of years, we wanted to 'downgrade' back to to point-and-shoot cameras, given that ours is about 5 years old, and newer ones are both more high-tech and relatively inexpensive for the given level of technology. We bought 'a few' to serve a couple of more or less specific roles, all shy of the DSLR's "big heavy super-high-quality photograph field cannon" role. The purpose of this one was to be... well, the cheap one. The everyday, easy-to-use, no-brainer, compact and lightweight and easy for my wife to put in the diaper bag and take to the museum or the park with the kids. Cheap enough that if you lost it or it got scratched by car keys, no big deal, nice enough to take good basic photos but otherwise no particularly fancy features.
Now, put in that context, time for the inevitable 'pros' and 'cons'.
Pros:
- Extremely compact, lightweight, 'sexy' design with chrome details around silver metal body
- Fast start-up, about 2.5 seconds to power up
- Continuous shooting can get maybe a hair more than 1 picture per second. Specs list as 0.7s intervals.
- Battery life seems to be good so far, about 200 pictures and several videos over the course of 3 days with all varieties of flash and zoom and the battery still indicates fully charged
- Zoom is pretty powerful for such a compact camera
Cons:
- Skittish. It's hard to get a clear picture from the thing even with a steady hand. Image stabilization does nothing as far as I can tell.
- Because of the former, producing sharp pictures with continuous shooting is pretty much hopeless
- Focus is hopeless in ISO3200. No, with any automatic or manual setting, with or without the flash, focus is hopeless. About 1 out of every 4 pictures came out well-focused. Even focused pictures seem to have blurry points in the same range as other objects that are at the same distance, even near the center of the scene. This is even for things like city scenes in full daylight.
- Abandon all hope, ye who shoot photos indoors... focus is abysmal. Did I already make this point?
- Because the focus is so poor, zooming in on anything, even a little, is absolutely and totally hopeless. Taking pictures of animals at the museum came out occasionally reasonably focused; zooming in as little as 2x produced worthless blurry shot after worthless blurry shot
- As with pretty much every point-and-shoot, the flash creates a scene completely washed out with white light - needs to be diffused.
- Very slow to become responsive after a photo; with or without a photo review, the camera takes about 5s to become responsive and available for another photo. This appears to be the case with 3mp the same as 14mp. Just very, very, very slow.
- Very slow to delete a picture; deleting a picture you don't like takes 3 clicks, then about 3 seconds to complete the operation. It's a little surprising how any device (phone, camera, gps, tablet, anything) could take that long to complete a simple operation...
- The shutter speed is too slow or simply wrong; if you have kids, who are naturally always in motion, they'll be a blur even if they're standing still to pose for a photo.
- Slow to actually fire a shot after zooming and pushing the button - sometimes 1 to 2 second delay, which means, the subject (kids!) is often simply gone by the time it actually shoots.
- Grainy. Even in broad daylight, color fields on high-res pics, like buildings and peoples' faces, is grainy and pixellated with blotchy color tones.
- Video. Can't record smoothly, even at lower resolution, with a high-quality Class 6 SDHC card. Don't bother with video.
To be perfectly fair and objective, I took this camera and our Samsung ST-95 outside and took two shots per camera, of each of five subjects, in the same resolution, at the same time. I chose the sharper of the two photos from each camera and renamed the file generically. I then brought up the photos on our 1080p 55" TV - the largest-format, highest-resolution screen in the house. I showed them to my wife and asked her to choose "before" and "after", letting her know that I had swapped the order of the pictures randomly (so that A wasn't always the Nikon, B wasn't always the Samsung). In 5 out of 5 cases, she picked (and I agreed) the Samsung's pictures, simply on the focus. The Nikon just can't focus correctly. For example, on the back patio, the kids' tricycle is relatively focused, but the grill right beside it - both near the center of the shot - is entirely blurred out. All of my subjects were stationary out of necessity; I could not get a single clear picture of the kids or dogs with the Nikon, so there was no relevant comparison to be made. Using "scenes" to balance the settings made absolutely no difference on focus, only color balance.
Overall, this camera is a fine solution if you don't expect much and you won't do much with it. You could shoot some video or take pictures of inert objects at medium range in full daylight and maybe one out of every two or three photos will be focused enough to pass a cursory inspection (don't look too close), but beyond that I'm afraid this camera just can't perform acceptably. It'll capture images, but they won't be GOOD. Despite the aforementioned purpose for which we bought this camera, we'll probably take around one of the better / other ones instead. It's really just about as well not to take a picture of those 'precious moments', as to attempt to do so with this camera. Other folks who have claimed that they are satisfied with this camera just can't be looking very closely at their pictures; after three outings and a few hundred pictures I am just amazed at how poor the quality of the shots are, in every environment, every light, every kind of subject. It's not for lack of use or lack of knowledge/experience with digital cameras; this really just has an extremely poor-quality sensor and processor and, I would assume, sub-standard firmware.
I suggest looking at other entry-level offerings such as Samsung ST-65. Or, go for a mid-range camera. You really should only consider this camera if the looks of the camera itself matter a whole lot more than the quality of the pictures it can take - and, if the quality of the pictures it takes don't matter much at all to you. If you do care about the ability to capture images, this camera will not be satisfactory.
I do not recommend this camera.
