Photo gallery: Samsung NV100HDAt 14.7 megapixels, the Samsung NV100HD is one of the highest resolution compact point-and-shoots available on the market today. The NV100HD that we received for review was a silver unit with black accents, though the model also comes in either gold, black or silver with red accents.
Design
For a supposedly compact camera, the Samsung's weight and unsightly lens protrusion won't endear it to the fashion crowd. It's surely a design that will polarise users; some will love it and others will hate the clunky look and feel. Unfortunately we fell into the latter category, as we found the casing to be incredibly slippery, with it falling out of our hands on a number of occasions, even when using the included wrist strap.
The NV100HD's 3-inch touchscreen takes up most of the available space at the back
(Credit: Samsung)
At the back is a 3-inch touchscreen with 460,000 pixels flanked by four buttons, which control the zoom, menu and playback functions. They are unobtrusive and blend nicely into the black surrounds of the screen. Up top sit the power and shutter buttons, backlit with blue, as well as the mode dial which twists around 360 degrees with some resistance. Underneath sits the battery/card slot, and the proprietary USB connector which is completely exposed to the elements.
The most cumbersome element of the design is the inane positioning of the flash unit. It pops up from the camera body and is situated just where your index finger rests when you hold the camera normally. This is more than just a design fault — it implies that no one actually considered how photographers would use this camera in the real world.
Features
At 14.7 megapixels, the NV100HD lays claim to be one of the highest resolution compact cameras on the market. It is in all respects a high-end point-and-shoot, competing with the likes of Canon's IXUS 980 IS.
The inclusion of high definition video recording (720p) certainly tips the scales in the Samsung's favour — for a full discussion of the video quality, see below. There is unfortunately no included HDMI cable in the box, so you'll need to purchase a cradle to provide HD output to a television.
Alongside the relatively small 3.6x optical zoom, there are a range of manual exposure controls available. Shutter and aperture settings can be assigned in 'M' mode, accessed from the top dial, though there are only two or three aperture values available depending on the extension of the lens.
Performance and Image Quality
As we know all too well, there is no point having millions of pixels crammed onto a smaller sensor just for the sake of it. The Samsung sacrifices some image quality to have such a headline-grabbing megapixel count.
Images at 100% magnification often lacked sharpness. Click for larger
(Credit: CNET.com.au)
Images captured at the highest resolution, in automatic mode, are not only grainy but lacked sharpness. Take a look at the 100 per cent crop over to the right, which demonstrates how detail often beomces blurred at full magnification — the shot was taken with all settings left on automatic, with ISO rated at 120 by the camera.
However, this same picture also shows that colour reproduction is quite good. Colours have enough saturation and display a good tonal range across the spectrum. The white balance, in particular, did a good job in some tricky lighting situations. We also liked how the camera didn't tend to blow out detail in high contrast situations and that skin tones in the dedicated beauty mode appeared realistic rather than touched up.
The touchscreen also worked in the Samsung's favour, with bright, vivid and punchy colours. It made pictures look better than they actually were when we reviewed them on a computer screen. Accessing playback functions in-camera though was sometimes troublesome. At times the screen was unresponsive when cycling backwards and forwards through pictures, and required numerous presses to get it to register our selection. That said, we did find that when we used an SDHC card rather than a standard SD card, it did improve the camera's responsiveness, indicating that the problem was not with the touchscreen, but rather the firmware. We assume that some sort of firmware update will be made available to address this issue.
Video quality was not particularly impressive; we found that there was a general loss of detail across the frame, alongside considerable noise issues on the moving image. Videos appeared dark overall, though we were impressed by the above average sound that the microphones were able to capture. Furthermore, we liked how the zoom worked during video recording, a feature that is often excluded from compact cameras.
Conclusion
While there is much to dislike about the styling and design of the NV100HD, at its heart it's definitely not a bad camera considering the incredibly high resolution. The touchscreen is good, apart from some responsiveness issues, and there are a myriad of scene modes and other options to fiddle with but, for the price, we wish that Samsung invested a little more into usability, as well as refining the features, before releasing it.
