Review Date: April 18, 2011
Category: Point-and-Shoot
Samsung SH100
HANDLING & FEEL
The Samsung SH100 is ultra compact at 93 x 53.9 x 18.9mm and light at 110.2g. It is all plastic but well built, easily slides into a jeans pocket and, because it is a touch screen camera, there are only a handful of buttons. It is available in red, black and silver.
The F3.3(W)-F5.9(T) lens provides a 5x wide-angle optical zoom which extends outside the body. At 26mm (equiv.), the starting focal length is great for wide-angle shots that will allow you to include a large group of friends or capture wide landscapes. The 130mm tele is perfect as a portrait lens allowing you to get close without getting “in your face.”
On the front of the camera, at top right of the lens is the AF-assist Light/Self-timer lamp. The flash is at top left and is powerful enough to reach 3.2m at wide-angle (ISO Auto).
Startup is fast at about 1 sec. (from Power ON to LCD ready for capture, i.e. time-to-first-shot). Shutter lag can be a mix: most times, you won’t notice a practical shutter lag but sometimes, there’s a slight delay. Shot to shot times is on the slow side at about 2 sec. (approx. 15 shots in 30 sec. in P mode, ISO Auto.).
In good lighting, AF is fast and precise. In low lighting, AF is also fast and locks precisely. The SH100 has Smart Touch AF [Home – P – Menu – Focus Area – Smart Touch AF] which allows you to simply point to the screen to focus on that spot. Simple and elegant. Smart Touch AF also locks onto your subject and tracks it as it and/or the camera moves. This works well enough if the movement is slow but it does not succeed to lock focus on small subjects, such as an insect that moves about. One Touch Shooting AF [Home – P – Menu – Focus Area – One Touch Shooting] goes one step further than Smart Touch and also takes the picture when you touch the screen.
It takes less than 1 sec. to save a Super Fine JPEG to (micro SD) memory card. At Quality = Super Fine, a 14MP JPEG image is compressed down to anywhere between 3MB and 5MB.
Included in the box is a rechargeable Li-ion battery BP85A that can take about 220 shots (Samsung’s standard) on a fresh charge. A Travel Adapter SAC-48 uses the USB Cable to recharge a depleted battery directly in-camera in approx. 180 min. It should be pointed out that the USB Cable is ridiculously short and if you need to plug in the travel adapter to an electrical outlet on the floor, then you need to inconveniently (not to mention, dangerously) rest the camera on the floor.
The Samsung SH100 uses the microSD (up to 2GB) or microSDHC (up to 8 GB) memory card.
Samsung SH100 Top View
The top of the camera has, from right to left (viewing from the back), the Shutter Release Button with the Zoom lever around it, the Power button, the microphone and the speaker. If you look carefully, you’ll notice the Playback button behind the shutter release button.
It takes about 2 seconds to zoom from wide to tele and I counted approx. 9 intermediate steps. Unfortunately, I was not able to disable digital zoom and it is too easy to slip past optical zoom into digital zoom territory. I recommend that you turn Intelli Zoom ON [Menu – Intelli Zoom – ON] so that you get a simple crop instead of a crop and pixel extrapolation (which reduces image quality). As soon as you venture into IntelliZoom territory, the image size will be reduced (cropped) depending on the amount of zoom (cropping) used.
The SH100 has Burst (0.8fps until memory card is full), Motion Capture (6fps at VGA size, max. 30 photos) and, more importantly, Auto Exposure Bracketing.
Samsung SH100 Back View
On the back of the SH100, you’ll find a generous 3.0-in. touch screen LCD panel with a standard 230k-dot resolution. The only control button is the MENU button at bottom right. The LCD display unfortunately does not gain up in low-light, so you won’t see well enough in extreme low light to compose on screen.
The LCD is a touch screen panel and if you are used to the smartphone icons and controls, you’ll feel right at home using the SH100 touch interface. It’s quite well designed, pretty looking and, more importantly, won’t frustrate you as too many menus do these days.
You can record HD 720p movies 1280 x 720 @ 30fps with monaural sound. A video clip is max. 20 minutes in length. You can zoom while filming videos, but you will also clearly record the zoom noise. You can however turn SoundAlive special zoom noise reduction technology ON to reduce that noise, though other noise may also get affected (best to use this feature only when there’s no speaking or other sound that need to be recorded in your movie). A third VOICE option is Zoom Mute, which mutes all sound during movie recording. Various Smart Filter effects can also be used during [regular, not Smart] Movie recording and I especially like the Sketch effect.
The plastic Terminal door opens up pretty wide to allow unimpeded access to the USB and A/V port (one port used by both cables). There is a nice Battery/Card door and the battery has a latch to keep it from accidentally falling. The tripod socket at the bottom is plastic; you won’t be able to change battery or memory card when the camera is on a tripod.
On my review camera, there is approx. 6.9MB of Internal Memory, which is not much, and I was able to save only two 5MP images in internal memory.
Besides the Wi-Fi capability, there are lots of creative effects, inluding the miniature and fisheye effects. One that will surely please the younger crowd is Magic Frame, which allows you to put a picture (usually a portrait) onto various built-in background frames, such as a book, a poster, a billboard, tv, t-shirt, etc.
The Samsung SH100 should make a great entry-level touch screen digital camera. Simplicity is the word — but well defined and implemented for a pleasant experience. It’s pocketable, handles well and the touch user interface works well. It’s above all an enjoyable camera to use.
Next: Samsung SH100 User’s Experience