Bulky, Slow, Heavy and Average Battery Life (Samsung Digimax 350SE)

Member Name: Deru

Product:	Samsung Digimax 350SE
Date:	31/01/08 (80 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good picture quality, Robust, Shutter fairly fast, Good in door night mode picture, Burst mode

Disadvantages: Price, Slowless, Bulky, Battery life

My dad bought a Samsung Digimax 350SE (Second Edition?) when he first wanted to go digital, when he went to Hong Kong because electronics (and pretty much everything else) are generally cheaper there. The camera is quite an old model now and can only be considered an entry-level digital camera with its 3.2 megapixel count but for some reason, it still costs £249.95 in some places! Maybe the "Schneider lens" has something to do with it, as they're known for being good quality and improves pictures or something.

The camera is silver and dark grey in colour and the build quality looks very high, but it is bit bulky compared to many cameras with similar specifications. It has a very sturdy feel to it though. The camera is capable of 3x optical zoom (where it protrudes the lens and zooms in) and 3x digital zoom (enlarges picture but loses quality). These features are quite standard nowadays. The 1.6" LCD display is protected by a pane of glass so even the screen is quite durable unlike other LCD screens that seem quite sensitive to touch.

TAKING PICTURES

Taking pictures normally is fairly easy but using some of the features may require reading the manual. The camera has a wheel at the top for you to choose the mode, as well as a bunch of buttons for navigation, other modes and zoom, etc.

On turning on the camera, it takes like 9 seconds for it to protrude the lens before you can start snapping! Takes around the same time to retract it when you turn it off! I hate this slowness! What if you suddenly wanted to take a picture of a something or someone moving that could be out of view any second? It also takes 7 seconds to finish storing the picture in the a 'Normal' quality setting and just over 10 seconds for finer pictures, which I think is a bit slow as well. Anyway, there's also a 'Movie Mode' where you can record 1 minute videos with sound, which is rather poor quality but at least there's sound. It can record 10 sound clips too. Shutter speed seems slightly faster than my Fujifilm. I did the 'remote control car' test again, where I hold the shutter button half way down to focus on the centre line, then press down fully for the picture when the car got to the line. I've found that it manages to capture the car before it got out of the picture. The car is quite quick and my Fujifilm was not able to catch it at all.

The picture quality is very good and 'Night Mode' shots are very impressive when indoors. Not as good outside though unless you're close to the target. I took a picture in very dark conditions (near complete darkness) and it still managed to capture stuff as if it was in light. It flashes twice and slows down shutter speed for it to do this. I also tried using the Macro function (for close-ups) but I couldn't get the picture in focus for some reason. I took over 15 pictures to no avail. I read the manual, which didn't help with this so I gave up. It also has self-timer, which I made use of when I needed to take pictures of myself without anyone around. It also has a 'burst' mode where it takes continuous pictures. It takes about one every second and continues until it's taken the number of pictures you specify (and probably if you run out of memory). I really like this feature.

32MB isn't a lot so I would advise getting a bigger CF card. On a 32MB card, you can fit 19 'Super Fine' pictures at the biggest size (2048x1536) and 59 at 'Normal' quality. Small size of 512x384, you can fit 333 pictures at 'Super Fine' quality and 767 at 'Normal' quality. There are various image sizes to set and free quality settings. 'Fine' being the one between.

There are other settings like brightness, contrast, white balance but I prefer to avoid those. Something I like about it is that it lets you print the date on the pictures unlike my Fujifilm! It can even record 10 second sound clips, which neat but just a gimmick.

ACCESSORIES

The camera comes with a hand strap, 32MB CF (Compact Flash) card, video cable, USB cable, video output cable, manual, warranty, CD with driver and software and even a camera case. The camera case is the plasticky type but seems to offer good protection. The manual, and CD has since been lost so thought it was a good opportunity to see how good the support was through the website that any good digital camera manufacturer would have. Searched through the official Samsung site (Samsung.com) for a while but couldn't find anything. Then Google'ed it and found I was supposed to go to Samsungcameras.com for camera support. Anyway, found the manual, and driver. Navigation on the site is very straight forward and the files I needed were fairly easy.

TRANSFERRING PICTURES TO PC

So once I had installed the driver, I was able to transfer images from the camera to my PC, using the USB cable provided. Simply set the camera to 'PC Connect Mode', connect the camera to a free USB port and complete the last driver installation steps when it detects the camera and you're good to go. The camera (all of CF card in the camera to precise) will appear as the removable drive under My Computer where you can transfer things to and from it. The transfer speed is not that fast, as it's limited to the slower USB 1.1 standard. It transfers 1.45MB in around 22 seconds. It also uses a bit of battery power so I'd recommend using a card reader to save power and for faster transfers if you have USB 2.0 on your computer.

OTHER

It takes a whopping 4 AA batteries. Even with this many batteries, battery life seems to be short. It does bring the weight up to 350g so it is fairly heavy. I don't have a problem with the weight but some people will and do, i.e. my mum who complains about it.

As it isn't really my camera, for the purpose of this review, I dropped the camera from a height of about 4 feet in my kitchen onto the hard floor. The camera survived without any visible damage and seems to work just fine. This may not have been the case if I had wooden flooring rather than the plastic tiled type but it still shows that the camera is quite robust and not a flimsy piece of rubbish. Only joking! I dropped it by accident! =Þ

* VERDICT *

I do like the picture quality and how well it takes pictures at night. I like some of the features but battery life, slowness, and the macro function usability lets me down. I don't recommend it for there are much better digital cameras around, especially since this one is a bit dated now. Many of the newer models even with the same pixel count can do the same if not a better job than the Digimax 350SE (but may have fewer features). Other cameras will cost A LOT less though. For the price of this camera, you can get a better one so shop around.

Thanks for reading!

Summary: An out dated Samsung Digital Camera

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