The Smart Album

With high capacity memory cards, there is nothing easier than to store hundreds of pictures on one single card.

The WB500 has a Smart Album functionality that allows you to organize your files according to the date, the type of file (photo or video) or even the colour tone. You will save yourself from scrolling forever to find what you were looking for.

Samsung’s WB500 is the first real contender to Panasonic’s TZ models. With its 24mm ultra-wide-angle lens, 10x optical zoom, 2,7’’display and HD video, this camera means serious business.

Handling

Though its body seems less robust than that of the Panasonic models, the WB500 has the advantage of being very simple to use. A slight bulge on the right side makes it easy to grasp the camera. The buttons fit the fingers and the device is truly user-friendly. The top part has the on/off button, the shutter button and there is a command lever to change exposure settings. You can choose among modes such as Auto, P, video, scenes, night… The manual mode (M) is an interesting feature but unfortunately you can only choose between two aperture settings. If you are at the wide focal length, it is either  F3.3/F7.5. To use the M mode, you simply switch the lever. P mode allows you to select ISO (or white balance or to correct exposure). The latter can be adjusted with the Fn command. If you press this button twice you get to a convenient quick menu (image size, autofocus zone, white balance, face detection..). The device also features a 4-way pad from which you can choose to do close-ups and an E control button that allows you to define a style of picture (black & white, forest…) or simply to create your own specific style by playing on contrasts. 

The camera boasts a  versatile Schneider-Kreuznach lens (Varioplan f/3,3-5,8) with telephoto capabilities from 24 to 240 mm, a dual stabilizer and allows you to do close ups from 5 cms. The 2,7’’ LCD display is pleasant to use with its open angles, good fluidity and a smooth 230 000 pixels resolution. However other brands do a better job here with 460 000 points. Start up time is merely 2 seconds, autofocus is very quick most of the time and recording is seamless. Burst mode is a bit slow with 1,8 frames per second, bt you can go for the lower definition that will deliver far speedier results at 6 frames per secocnd.

Picture quality

Over the years Samsung has made much progress in this area so let us see how well this "TZ Killer" performs.

Sadly noise is quite present. As with the Samsung NV24, the loss of detail appears at ISO 200. Blurring is quite obvious and increases in higher sensitivities. At ISO 800 and 1600, pictures seem to carry a thin veil. Good news however: chromatic noise is almost not to be found.

We must underline however that the camera we tested was part of a Samsung pre-series. The picture quality may improve on the final product and we will check this as soon as we get our hands on a regular model.

The 24-240 mm lens is rather discreet and the distortions (when using wide angle) are not severe. The shapes become slightly curved near the edges, but the centre is perfectly decent. You will see some chromatic aberration but there is little of it. Under tungsten light you will naturally end up with a warm colour range but one way of preventing that is to set up white balance manually. The flash gives good results as long as you do not go any further than 3 m from the subject you are shooting.

The optical image stabilizer did well on our Barbie test, but the limited aperture of the lens makes you increase sensitivity almost straight away. Therefore you have to be at ISO 1600 to reach a shutter speed of 1/8 second.
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Video is compressed with H.264 standards and therefore file sizes (.MOV) are a little smaller (1 MB per second of video). In dim-light conditions, results are not as crisp as we would like them to be, but still remain correct. You can zoom while recording video (slower than when shooting photos) and without much noise. You can always turn off sound when zooming but beware, the results are a bit surprising!