Samsung S85 eight-megapixel digital camera
The Peoples' Choice?
Review Remember the days when even an entry-level digital camera cost the proverbial arm and a leg? Nowadays, low-price doesn’t have to mean low performance or even low in features. If you’re looking for a decent digital camera today, you can pick up a fairly well-specified model for a little over £100.
Let’s face it: not everyone wants, needs or can afford a megapixel monster with the processing power of a Cray supercomputer and a zoom lens the length of a basketball player’s arm.
Samsung's S85:
Many people are simply looking for a camera with the PPS factor – Pick-up, Point and Shoot. So hats off to Samsung for launching such a product at a highly affordable price. At just a penny under £120, this is indeed a product for the masses. In fact, we've decided to dub the S85 The Peoples’ Camera.
So what do you get for your hard-earned? You get a pretty impressive camera considering the price, with an 8.2-megapixel image sensor; a 5x optical zoom that’s roughly equivalent to a 38-190mm lens on a 35mm camera; an ISO rating from 50 to 1600; and a top shutter speed of 1/2000s. There’s 20MB of built-in Flash memory, although you’d be wise to invest in an SD card if you want to take more than a few high-res shots - the S85 supports SDHC cards up to 4GB in size. You also get face-detection technology and ASR shake-reduction thrown in. And there are lots more goodies, which we’ll talk about later.
Around the back is a decent-sized, 2.5in LCD
Bundled in the box are a few accessories, including two AA-sized rechargeable NiMH batteries - although, funnily enough, the instruction book claims these are an optional extra - a USB cable, AV cable with RCA audio and composite-video jacks, battery charger, a CD-Rom containing photo editing software, and a strap. There’s also a small instruction book - the full version is available as a PDF file on the disc.
COMMENTS
Movies more than 10 seconds!
I think things got a little confused in this review:
The *AUDIO*-Sequences have a maximum duration of 10 seconds (Samsung datasheet).
I don' t think, the videos have this small length, too. Imagine, they added a video editing function to this camera - for what, if vids have max. 10 seconds?
It would be nice to mention some more about video quality of the cam and more about the ASR function of the cam - also about the noise on different ISO adjustment!
Autofocus through glass
I don't know why you are so impressed that the autofocus works through glass that you have to say it twice. These cameras don't use infrared to focus, they look for high frequency components in the image, so if they can see through glass, they can focus through it. If the glass has strong reflections on it they may focus on those, instead - but you'd see those reflections in the picture, which would be crap.
It would have been useful to mention start-up and shutter lag times, too.
Food Mode
Clearly you are unaware that over here in Asia we like to take pictures of our food......all the time. Doesn't matter how cheap it is or the occasion just whip out the camera and take a picture of the food and post it on your favourite webboard.
Photoshop support for raw data?
Not my field, but I thought support for making raw data files that Photoshop can read is becoming a standard feature.. Any word on support for that with the S85?
I'm sorry, what's the IT angle on this?
Well, not exactly, but why exactly do we need a glowing review of a bottom end bog standard camera with mediocre features (e.g. only 10 seconds of video), and no comparisons of sensor noise, etc.
