Excellent High Definition Compact Camera & HD Video Recorder In One! (Samsung NV100HD)

Member Name: Lehen

Product:	Samsung NV100HD
Date:	17/06/09 (309 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: superb quality 14.7mpx HD camera & video recorder with touchscreen & HDMI output

Disadvantages: Some users may have to watch they don't put their fingers over where the flash pops up

For a compact camera this is quite a powerful little guy to carry around with you.

I spotted this in the Jan sales with £100 off and for a top of the range compact it was well worth splashing the cash on one considering what you get for your money!

Not only do you get a 14.7 megapixel camera. Yes, that's right - a 14.7! You also get a built-in High Definition video recorder. With a decent memory card inside of the Samsung NV100HD you can take a lot of really great high quality snaps and the camera itself is very compact, hence the name. Since buying this I've never left the house without it.

The picture quality you should expect from the camera is very sharp and detailed, what else do you expect from something that has a crazy amount of megapixels! The camera comes with a 28mm Wide Schneider Kreuznach Lens and 3.6x Optical Zoom, with Advanced DRIM Engine Image Processor. With these combined with the included Perfect Portrait System (Face Detection, Smile & Blink Detection, Beauty Shot) and Dual Image Stabilisation (Digital & Optical Image Stabilisation) means you can capture just about ANYTHING as a beginner with not much effort.

If you want to take photos of family and friends, this is great for group shots as it detects everyones faces in the photo before taking the shot - so no more blurred or out of focus photos ever again! With the image stabilisation features it means you can take photographs of kids, animals and people who just can't stand still for a single second! With continous shooting modes you can get some good photos of sports and activities and if those kids and animals are ultra-fast there's settings that will capture even that!

Self-portraits or taking shots of other people also benefits multiple shooting modes that allow a novice to pick up the camera and take really good pictures, along with advanced settings that allow you to change ISOs and aperatures, white balances just like you can with a DSLR.

The NV100HD comes with a really impressive 3.0" hVGA Touch Screen LCD @ 460K pixels using the Smart Touch 2.0 User Interface. If you own an iPhone, or are familiar with touchscreen devices, the one on the Samsung rivals it easily.

Once you've taken your shots you can use the touchscreen to quickly select photos from thousands and edit them with the built-in camera software. There is even a nice 'beauty shot' application, which works when taking a photo that smooths out textures on your face and softens the lighting to give you a semi-professional studio shot.

One of the key selling points to this camera (other than the impressive list of features above) is the High Definition Video and Still Image feature that allows both video and photographs to be captured in High Definition!

I've taken various videos with it, close-ups, low-light, slow moving, fast moving objects and it is quite a reasonable HD video recorder. In places it can be slightly jerky, but if you have a steady hand it can take 'most' average home videos spot on with next to no issues. I even took a 20minute HD video of a coach journey shot outside of the window to give it a good test, then played it back on a 50" HDTV when I got home via a HDMI cable. The results were quite great to be perfectly honest. I wasn't expecting it to look as clear and as sharp as it did!

With a memory card in place you are pretty much set to go for a long time and when you get home and if your Blu-ray player supports SD cards (most do) you can truely benefit from the HD capture and the 14.7 megapixel quality. The end results (even below average photos) look stunning, even on a huge 50" TV!

The Samsung NV100HD is a really great camera - you will be shocked that you can just slip this into your pocket!

Last but by no means least...the battery life! This is a key feature for all cameras and rest assured, the life on the battery is nothing but excellent! I usually have problems getting a battery on a phone or camera to last, but this one is head and shoulders above the rest. I must of been able to take about 50 photos (most without flash) and record about 20-30 minutes worth of max quality HD video to take the batter down to half from a full charge. On a full charge without using much flash or recording HD video you can shoot for hours on end without worry of your battery going to die on you.

To top it all off, this little gem even looks and feels great. I don't usually get excited about hardware, but this is something worth shouting about.

If you're wanting to upgrade your compact and you fancy tinkering with a HD cam and video recorder - this is money well spent.

Summary: Great all-round High Definition compact

Processing/Quality:
Reliability:
Ease of use:
Features:
Picture quality: