Samsung PL210

As is usually the way, the price of superzoom compacts is being pushed ever downwards. With the exception of a few star models that are packed with technology, you can now pick up a compact with a CCD sensor and a 10x zoom lens for under £200. The Samsung PL210 is one such model. It's affordable, colourful, compact and has a 27-270 mm zoom lens.

Handling

Since the PL210 is first and foremost a budget compact, it's fairly safe to assume that Samsung has had to save money on the camera's design and build. Like many entry-level compacts, the PL210 is therefore a bit like comic-book baddie Harvey Dent (aka Two-Face) with a nice, pleasant side and a distinctly more ugly side. The more visible front face of the camera is made with high-quality materials and is well made and assembled, as is the upper edge, which slopes forward slightly and is home to the shutter-release button and zoom controls.


On the back it's a completely different story though, as here, the PL210 is made from low-quality plastics and has a low-def TN screen with tight viewing angles and approximative colour fidelity (even when you're facing the screen straight on). The few raised lines that are supposed to constitute a thumb rest aren't particularly effective, and although the camera doesn't weigh much (we measured 163 g but Samsung announces 148 g, measured without the battery or memory card), it does tend to slide out of your hand a bit. You'll need to support the camera with two hands most of the time.

Rather inexplicably, the PL210 is only compatible with micro SD memory cards! Year after year, Samsung seems to be increasing its range of micro SD-only devices to the detriment of regular SD cards, even though these are the market standard for compact cameras since Olympus ditched its xD format. Plus, micro SD cards don't come with very high storage capacities and they're slower than standard SD cards, which will make things pretty painful for snap-happy photographers when it comes to transferring pictures to a computer. They're also easier to lose, especially when you're used to working with a card reader. Needless to say, we're not all that impressed with this choice.

Otherwise, the camera's interface is really quite pleasant and, as usual with Samsung cameras, the menus and graphic user interface are nice, clear and well organised. There's a handy Quick menu that you access via the Fn button and which can be used to change all the main settings. Our main regret is that you can't switch to video mode directly as there's no separate video button.

Responsiveness

It's a bit of a mixed bag in this field. On the one hand, we don't like the fact that this camera takes three seconds to start up ... or that you have to wait an even more painful 3.4 seconds between two photos!

On the other hand, the autofocus is within average for current compacts in good light conditions (6/10 to 7/10 of a second) and it remains just as fast in low light, which is quite simply excellent! Very few compacts can focus on a poorly lit scene (3 lux in our test) in under a second!

Picture Quality

With a 14-Megapixel CCD we weren't expecting any miracles in the way the PL210 handles digital noise.



It's therefore no surprise to see the PL210's maximum usable setting is 400 ISO—a heavy smoothing effect is way too visible at 800 ISO to make 8" x 10" (20 x 27 cm) prints consistently feasible.

We've never seen this 27-270 mm lens before so we were keen to see how it performed. At the maximum wide-angle setting we measured a horizontal field of view of 63.5° which is closer to an equivalent focal length of 28 mm than 27 mm. The distortion correction system could have something to do with this though, slightly cropping the final image as a result (distortion is corrected by the camera's internal software, something that becomes only too apparent in video mode).


At wide-angle settings the middle of the frame is relatively sharp, even if we've seen better elsewhere (the finest contour lines on the map in our test scene are picked out better in other models). The edges of the shots are clearly not as sharp though, and this would be noticeable on an 8" x 10" (20 x 27 cm) print. It's the same story at telephoto settings too, although quality is a bit worse, with the centre of the frame looking slightly hazy and the edges looking soft and blurry. That's something that you'd even notice on a 4" x 6" print (11 x 15 cm) if you looked closely enough. However, this makes all the more sense when you consider that the lens is only opening to f/5.9, as diffraction is often a problem from f/5 onwards.

Video

There's nothing wrong with 720p HD video ... in theory. But when excessive contrast drowns out darker areas and overexposes light areas, when fuzzy noise is visible in mid-tone colours, and when the image suffers from visible distortion at wide-angle settings (which is corrected more effectively in photo mode), it's suddenly a lot less appealing.

Plus, the mono sound is muffled, crushing voices and sharp noises, while echoes are also a problem. Worse still, the noise of the zoom and the autofocus are picked up by the microphone and can clearly be heard in videos. All in all then, this mode is best avoided.