Samsung ST95

The Samsung ST95 is a touchscreen compact with a 5x wide-angle zoom lens and a budget price tag. It has a fairly modest set of tech specs and no stabilisation system. Although that's pretty common for an entry-level camera, it's still quite rare to find a touchscreen in this price bracket.

Handling

First of all, a word about the camera's thickness. Since Samsung doesn't use CIPA standards (a Japanese association) to measure its cameras and insists on measuring them as it likes, the 17 mm announced on the spec sheet actually becomes 21 mm when you include the camera's lens! The ST95 is therefore much thicker than a Sony T-series camera, for example.

Otherwise, the ST95 is a fairly standard plastic compact with a decent build quality and finish—even if the totally smooth casing can make it difficult to grip (especially when used for long periods of time, see inset). Needless to say, the three little lines that apparently constitute a thumb-rest don't do much to improve grip.


The back of the camera is taken up almost entirely by the large touchscreen but the 230,000-dot definition isn't really sufficient for a 3-inch screen (7.6 cm). The image looks pixellated and the actual usable definition is further reduced in photo mode since there are black bands down either side of the screen when you shoot 4:3-format pictures. Note that you have to switch the camera to 4:3 mode as, out of the box, the ST95 snaps 16:9-format shots using all the screen but taking pictures in 12-Megapixel resolution instead of 16 Megapixels. Viewing angles are very tight, particularly when you're looking at the screen from below. Plus, the contrast is excessive and colours aren't reproduced accurately at all.

The touchscreen interface is a mixed bag, with some pleasant features borrowed directly from smartphones interfaces, such as pointing and sliding a finger to scroll through menus. It also has some strange idiosyncrasies though, like the fact you can't change the shooting mode by pressing the mode icon—you instead have to press the physical 'Home' button on the bottom right edge of the camera. This brings up a series of icons for shooting modes (automatic, programme, creative filters etc.), as well as the camera settings, album browsing and photo editing options. You'll therefore have to sift through three pages of icons just to change the camera's mode!

We had a few surprises when browsing through the options too. For example, in playback mode, the Quick Menu has options for resizing, reorientating and even correcting the perspective of an image. However, the picture editing mode allows you to change colours, contrast, smoothing etc. but not to resize a picture!

What's more, the touchscreen lacks sensitivity, which means you need to press quite hard for your commands to be taken into account. The the interface isn't always as responsive as it could be either.

One other slightly annoying thing is that the camera uses micro-SD cards, which are slower and less practical to use than standard SD cards—especially since you'll need an adapter to use them with most card readers.

Responsiveness

Ouch! The ST95 takes three seconds to start up and three seconds to save a photo. OK, so the autofocus does a pretty good job, taking under a second to work even in low light, but the sluggish ST95 is sure to have you swearing on more than one occasion.

The worst thing is that in 'Smart Auto' mode, which is recommended for beginners, the flash goes back to its automatic setting each time you turn the camera off and on again. So if the ST95 decides it needs to use the flash, it takes three extra seconds to charge it before taking a picture.

Picture Quality

As Samsung tends to trail slightly behind the current market leaders for image processing in digital cameras, we were keen to see what the ST95 and its 16-Megapixel CCD could do.



In terms of noise, the results are very similar to what we saw with the 14-Megapixel CCD in the SH100, for example. In other words, noise is visible on an 8" x 10" (20 x 27 cm) picture from 400 ISO, and is problematic from 800 ISO.

The lens doesn't give consistent sharpness at wide-angle settings. This, unfortunately is only too visible, and can even be seen on a 4" x 6" (11 x 15 cm) print. These results are comparable to the Samsung SH100, which has the same lens and which we tested in our lab at the same time as this model.


At 130 mm though, we were pleasantly surprised to see that our ST95 did a much better job than the SH100. It's nothing to get too excited about though, as the picture could still be a good deal sharper and the lens still doesn't use those 16 Megapixels to their full potential. However, an 8" x 10" print will still look decent enough over the whole frame.

The lack of stabilisation is clearly problematic, and we only got a reasonably sharp shot of Barbie at a disappointing 1/15 of a second.

Video

The ST95 films 720p HD video, which is the current standard for compact cameras. You can use the optical zoom while filming but the over-contrasted image blocks together darker zones and overexposes bright areas, wiping out detail as a result. Plus, the continuous autofocus is remarkably ineffective. The sound recorded is typically mediocre, as like most entry-level cameras, the mono microphone makes things sound muffled, confused and generally a bit 'whooshy'.