Samsung ST50 Ultra Slim Digital Camera Review

Performance

[ad#review987-top]Something I have found is that more and more camera manufacturers now provided you with a partially charged battery. This is great when you want to try out your new toy and not have to wait hours when you first open up your new toy. Press the power button and the lens slides out ready for you to start capturing the world around you.

Typically for an average user the default camera settings would be most sufficient. I tend to like to ensure I have the best possible photo quality the camera can capture, so the two setting changes I like to make would be the Photo Size and Quality. Changing these two settings to their maximum will create larger file sizes which will lower the amount of photos you can take, but it also ensures you have a higher print quality in the end.

Most digital cameras have basic modes you can change depending on what you are trying to capture on digital. With the Samsung ST50 they have an auto mode called Smart Auto. What Smart Auto does is takes the guesswork out and lets you just point and shoot. I was pretty cool to see the camera change into facial recognition mode when I pointed it towards someone’s face. It would then change to landscape more if I was shooting something outside.

In total there are 11 optimized settings the camera can choose based on what you are pointing the camera at. Those settings are: Macro, MacroText, Landscape, Backlight Portrait, Night, Night Portrait, White, Tripod, Action, Portrait and Backlight.

The Smart Auto feature is pretty interesting; though I am someone who loves to control what the camera does, not have the camera control itself. In Smart Auto mode, the camera will select the appropriate settings for you to get the best shot possible.



Samsung ST50 Ultra Slim Digital Camera

When you turn off the Smart Auto mode the little icon the top left corner of the LCD screen goes from Smart to a camera icon with the little P. Typically this `P’ mode means programmable; you can choose the camera settings to shoot with. Now the Samsung ST50 isn’t an advanced digital camera so you won’t be able to change the Aperture or Shutter Speed values, but it will allow you adjust the Exposure Adjustment Value (EV), White Balance, and ISO.

Other settings you can change are: Face Detection, Photo Size, Photo Quality, Automatic Color Balance, Metering, Drive, Framing Guide, Focus Area, Photo Style Selector, Digital Image Stabilization and Voice recording.

A fun feature that more compact digital cameras have is the Movie mode. The Samsung ST50 supports MPEG-4 format at SVGA quality (800×592, 20 fps), but if you want decent play back of your movies you will want to select the 640×480 resolution at 30 fps (frames per second). You can also zoom in and out while recording a movie too, which some digital cameras lack. The movie mode is great when you want to capture a quick clip of something happening, you will probably not want to use it to capture an entire baseball game or concert for example.

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