Design and Features
When you think about camera lenses, "zoom" is probably the first word that comes to mind. Lots of camera manufacturers focus on giving their cameras the longest zoom lenses available, but while 5x, 10x, and 12x lenses are all handy for getting up close to far-away targets, they're not so good for wide shots. Typically, these high-zoom lenses have wide angles equivalent to 35 or 38 millimeters, which is relatively narrow for taking shots of groups, landscapes, or buildings. The 7-megapixel Samsung L74W's lens is designed for framing the big picture.
Also know as the L74 Wide, the L74W specialises in taking wide-angle shots. Its 3.6x zoom lens starts at a 28mm-equivalent angle of view, letting you fit more into your shot, which tends to be much more useful in everyday situations. For example, a 28mm-equivalent lens can get more people into a group photo, or frame a tall building without forcing you to step back as far as you would with a 35 or 38mm-equivalent lens. In an attempt to help keep your shots steady, the L74W includes Samsung's Advanced Shake Reduction, an electronic image stabilisation system that boosts ISO sensitivity and speeds up the shutter for high-speed and zoomed-in shots.
The solid-feeling L74W is actually rather slim, measuring approximately 25mm thick. Its metal body is a nick magnet, though; the black surface seemed to pick up scratches at the slightest tap. The camera itself feels quite durable, but you won't keep it in pristine shape for long. A 3-inch touch screen LCD takes up the entirety of the camera's back. It serves as the camera's primary control interface, supplemented only by two buttons and the zoom rocker. Every setting, from flash to white balance, must be changed through the touch screen menus. As with most touch screen interfaces, navigating with the L74W's screen feels awkward and unresponsive, and repeated taps are often necessary to access the right function.
For jet-setting photographers, the L74W offers a unique feature, a useful little on-camera guidebook called the World Tour Guide. While it contains information for countries and cities all over the world, it's far from comprehensive; it mostly lists landmarks and places to visit, with a small snapshot and a short text blurb to go with each place. Unfortunately, the details are pretty sparse; descriptions of landmarks like the Empire State Building and the Bronx Zoo don't even list their addresses, never mind helpful details such as hours and events. You also have to navigate the guide entirely through the touch screen, a frustrating feat for full-fingered users. Worse yet, you have to download the various guidebooks from Samsung's World Tour Guide site and install them on the camera yourself. Only install the guides to the countries you plan to visit, though; the World Tour Guide can eat up a significant chunk of the L74W's 450MB internal storage, and you can't install it on a memory card.
Performance
With a lagging shutter and long shot-to-shot time, the L74W's performance seriously disappoints. The camera takes an arduous 4.4 seconds to start up and capture its first image, and can only fire off a single shot every 2.8 seconds after that. With the onboard flash enabled, that shot-to-shot wait balloons into 4.2 seconds. The shutter lagged a painful 0.9 second with our high-contrast subject and an otherwise respectable 1.1 seconds with our low-contrast target. Burst mode shot quickly enough, snapping nine photos in 6.4 seconds for a rate of 1.4 frames per second.
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)
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Typical shot-to-shot time | |
Time to first shot | |
Shutter lag (typical) |
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)
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Typical continuous-shooting speed |
Image quality
Photos taken on the L74W range from mediocre to terrible, sporting some of the worst noise we've seen in recent months. Noise filled a majority of our shots, appearing heavily at levels as low as ISO 200. The noise appears as a muddled, fuzzy grain at low levels, though at ISO 800 and 1600 it becomes a maelstrom of blurry static. Besides the massive amount of noise, the L74W's photos also suffered from heavy fringing. A fuzzy pink appeared around almost every high-contrast edge (white flowers against green leaves, gray bricks against blue sky).
Despite the fringing and noise, the camera's photos have one redeeming feature: they aren't very distorted. With both wide-angle and high-zoom lenses we often see distortion on at least one end of the zoom range. The L74W's lens barely distorted zoomed shots, and wide-angle shots suffered from only modest barrel distortion.
Though its wide lens and World Tour Guide are very useful features, the Samsung L74W simply has too many flaws to ignore. An irritating touch screen interface, painfully slow performance, and noise-filled photos make this a camera we simply can't recommend.
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