Samsung SH100
- Category: Digital Cameras
July 18, 2011
Editor's Rating
- Small and lightweight
- Wireless sharing capabilities
- Very good image quality
- Mediocre low light image quality
- Below average video quality
- Touchscreen responsiveness issues
The Samsung SH100 is a compact, point-and-shoot 14-megapixel digital camera that is cheap in price, but still offers good quality images. It has lots of shooting modes, wireless connectivity as well as a touchscreen display, but the lack of manual controls limits it use.
The Samsung SH100 measures 3.7 x 2.1 x 0.7-inches (whd), which makes it extremely compact and can easily fit into a pants or shirt pocket. The plastic body does make it feel a little "cheap" in design, but it does feel fairly sturdy and solid. It comes in three colors choices: black, red and silver.
On the backside, you'll find a 3-inch touchscreen display with a 230k pixel resolution. The screen's quality is very good and has a good brightness level, but we found the screen to be rather unresponsive. The touchscreen is resistive, so you do have to give the screen a good solid press for its to be recognized. This can make entering information, especially wireless login information, with the on-screen keyboard somewhat difficult. The interface on the Samsung SH100 is pretty straightforward to use and the options are clearly labeled.
Because this camera has a touchscreen, there's a lack of physical buttons. There are just four buttons, which include a power button on the top, a shutter & zoom control, a playback control and a home button on the back to take you back to the camera's main menu.
Some of the specifications of the Samsung SH100 include a 14.2-megapixel CCD image sensor, a 5x optical zoom (5x digital zoom) with a focal length of 4.7mm-23.5mm or a 35mm equivalent of 26mm to 130mm. The aperture settings range from f3.3 to f9.4 in wide-angle mode and f5.9 to f16.7 telephoto. There's also electronic image stabilization, but it doesn't seem to work too well. The camera uses a MicroSD memory card instead of the traditional SD card, which is a little strange.
Because there's a lack of manual options, Samsung does include many in-camera features, especially in the range of effects and scene modes. There is a Smart Auto mode that works for both images and videos, but there's also six selection options and a Program mode that lets you slightly tweak ISO settings, white balance and some other features. There's also in-camera editing that lets you adjust some of the basic aspects of the images, like brightness and contrast. There are also some filters to add some stylistic effects.
The built-in wireless (802.11b/g/n) works with the free Remote Viewfinder application that works on either the Samsung Galaxy S II or Galaxy S smartphones. You can use this application to take pictures via remote control and adjust some of the camera's settings. You don't need to be in the range of a Wi-Fi hotspot to use this feature since it's just peer-to-peer. While this feature is a neat idea, in the ends it's just novel and somewhat limited. You can also use the wireless feature to upload and send images to your e-mail or sites like Facebook, Photobucket, Picasa, YouTube and Samsung's own sharing service.
The image quality of the Samsung SH100 is very good, especially for a little point-and-shoot. The color quality and sharpness was rated as very good, but using the flash in dark conditions didn't work so well. We found the 720p HD, 30fps videos to be only rated as fair as well-lit conditions produced only average quality video and darker conditions produced unwatchable videos.
