I went shopping for a digital camera and was willing to spend up to twice the price of this little Samsung, but I liked this one better than the others I looked at. I was replacing a Canon SD 750 that had been somewhat disappointing.
I have a young child, and as any parent knows, this has a significant impact on one's priorities when purchasing a digital camera. I need a camera that can quickly record a shot of a moving target.
With my older digital cameras, I have had problems with indoor shots - too much flash, not enough, or in the case of the Canon, inaccurate white balance.
When I tried out different cameras at the store, this Samsung definitely was the quickest shot. I sampled it with the internal memory. The salesman told me that it would do even better with a high speed memory card, and this seems to be true.
I've only had the camera for a few days, but I've taken about 100 pictures, both indoor and outdoor, and a few videos. I have used the "auto" setting almost exclusively.
The lag time on this camera is far better than any I have ever owned and better than more expensive cameras that I tried at the store. I took pictures of both children and animals. I took multiple pictures in quick succession and was very happy with the speed. It was much better than the Canon SD750, which is a more expensive camera.
The indoor pictures are very good. This has been a problem with digital cameras I have owned in the past - either too much flash, too little, or bad white balance. The indoor pictures I took with this camera were not perfect, but they were more than adequate. My 7-year-old took some indoor pictures with it, and those are quite nice, too. I took pictures of elephants at a zoo through a plexiglass wall in an indoor exhibit, and the images are crisp with perfect color. Outdoor pictures were fantastic with very realistic color.
I like to use the zoom lens a lot, and I wish I could have purchased this camera with a longer optical zoom. The pictures I took with a fully extended zoom lens were generally very nice. A few of them were a bit blurry, but I imagine that this was the result of camera motion. My 7-year-old took a very close range picture of some crayons (about six inches away) and the image is in perfect focus with excellent color.
Printed versions of the photos were also excellent, using a fairly old Kodak printer dock. The exposure of the indoor pictures is not quite as good as on the computer, but it's still adequate and the colors are good. When I printed pictures on this printer from my Canon, the edges of the images were always cutoff, and that is not the case with this Samsung camera.
The camera uses a propietary battery which charges in about 3 hours. The battery can be charged via USB or a regular outlet. The camera has a single USB cable (also proprietary) that plugs into the camera at one end and a USB outlet or into the charger at the other end. The cable is only around 12 inches long. That is my biggest complaint about this camera.
The videos shot with the camera are good. The camera zoom lens works while recording video, but the sound on the video cuts out while the zoom is in use. It's less than ideal, but better than other cameras I've used.
The camera is small and stylish and the controls are just like every other camera. One small difference - when you turn the wheel to change the shooting mode, the LCD screen offers a brief explanation of each function. The LCD screen seems more smudge-prone than those of other cameras I've used. The camera does not have an optical viewfinder, but the LCD screen worked great in the dull Seattle spring sunshine. I'll have to get back to you later about how it functions in "real" sunshine.
The "samsung master" software has crashed every time I've tried to use it. (on Vista). I don't have any use for this software, so this issue doesn't concern me.
All in all, I'm very pleased with this camera. It's an excellent value.
Get more detail about Samsung SL202 10MP Digital Camera with 3x Optical Zoom and 2.7 inch LCD (Silver).
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