Samsung SH100

No doubt inspired by the growing popularity smartphones, connected cameras seem to be all the rage right now. The Samsung SH100 boasts Wi-Fi and DLNA compatibility for a quick and easy way to share your photos with the world, whether via Facebook, e-mail or other services. Connectivity aside, the SH100 has a fairly modest set of tech specs, with a 26-130 mm zoom lens, a 14-Megapixel CCD and no stabilisation system.

Handling

When you first pick up the SH100 it feels like quite a nice camera. It's light, reasonably well built, and although it's made entirely from plastic, the materials used don't feel too cheap. Nitpickers may be a bit disappointed with the two plastic bars that are supposed to constitute a thumb-rest on the back of the camera, which certainly aren't as comfortable as a rubber grip. On the whole though, the SH100 has a nice design.


Unfortunately, the screen isn't quite so nice. Using our electronic sensor, we found that dark greys ended up being blocked together into one dark mass and that light greys were overexposed. Similarly, colour fidelity leaves a lot to be desired. But there's no need for a special sensor to see that the screen's low definition just isn't sharp enough and that tight vertical viewing angles make the screen go dark when you view it from above or below.

The touchscreen interface is worth a mention. Apart from the frustrating lack of accuracy when you try to press on things, Samsung has had a few good ideas, such as point-and-slide style menus typically seen in mobile phones. The interface does have a few strange idiosyncrasies though, such as the fact that you have to press a physical button (the one with the 'home' symbol on it) to change the shooting mode—pressing the icon of the current mode  on the touchscreen only brings up a box with a brief explanation of the mode you're using.

Similarly, the interminable list of modes seems to go on for ever, including shooting modes (scene modes, creative filters, P mode, video mode and auto mode), connected modes (e-mail, Facebook/Picasa, DLNA, etc.—see inset) and playback modes (Cover Flow-style album, magazine, photo editor etc.). All of these options take up no less than four onscreen pages and, bizarrely, some of the options appear twice! For example, there's a 'vignetting' mode in the shooting mode menu that has some customisable settings and a standard 'vignetting' mode in the creative filters menu.

Plus, given that responsiveness can also be a problem, the interface is nowhere near as smooth as your average smartphone, let alone Sony's latest touchscreen cameras. Samsung needs to seriously rework the SH100's interface if the firm really wants to exploit its full potential.

Although sold as a 14-Megapixel camera, out of the box, the SH100 is set to 16:9 mode, shooting in 10-Megapixel resolution with a wide-angle focal length of 29 mm instead of 26 mm. You have to manually switch the camera to full resolution in order to get a 4:3 image and the wide angle advertised in the tech specs ... and, of course, the black bands down either side of the screen, which further reduce the effective definition of onscreen images.

Responsiveness

Basic compact cameras can sometimes be very quick to start up since they don't have the large or complicated lenses seen in some higher-end models. This isn't the case with the SH100, however, which takes over two seconds to take its first photo. It also takes at least two seconds to save a photo, unless you switch to burst mode (1.5 fps—on the better side of average for an entry-level compact).

That said, the autofocus is actually pretty fast and doesn't slow down too much in low light.

Strangely enough, even if the SH100 isn't all that slow when taking pictures, it's the internal menus that make this camera feel slow to use. There's obviously a delay to the touchscreen controls, but on top of that, the graphic user interface itself is incredibly sluggish, particularly when going in and out of Wi-Fi modes. The SH100 is a strictly mono-task camera and has to cut out the connection (taking three long seconds) before you can do anything else with the camera or bring up the menu.

Picture Quality

First the good news: in the centre of the frame at wide-angle settings and at 80 ISO, digital noise is under control and pictures are sufficiently detailed to make decent prints.


We won't spend too long outlining the camera's performance at other settings, though, as there's really not much point. The corners of shots look blurred at 26 mm on a 4" x 6" (11 x 15 cm) print and noise is highly visible on 8" x 10" (20 x 27 cm) photos from 400 ISO. Don't even think about printing 4" x 6" photos with pictures taken at 800 ISO!


So what happens when you zoom? Well, an optimist would say that pictures are consistent in quality across the frame, but in actual fact, the middle of the frame becomes just as blurred as the edges, making a shot that's uniformly fuzzy all over.

Moreover, this camera has no stabilisation system, which means it only manages to take an almost clear but not-so-sharp shot of Barbie in 1/15 of a second (see our comments above about noise at 800 ISO).


In the end, the Samsung SH100 has to be among the worst cameras we've ever tested. It only managed to scrape a second star thanks to the fact that it's marginally better at taking pictures than the likes of the Nintendo DSi.

Video

The video mode is yet another unremarkable feature of the SH100. It films 720p video, which is really the bare minimum for a compact in 2011. You can use the zoom while filming, but picture quality is really only just acceptable due to excessive contrast, plenty of fuzz when filming indoors and heavy barrel distortion. Similarly, the mono sound recorded is muffled and confused.