The Samsung SH100 offers connectivity and fun, but hides an otherwise average point and shoot

Samsung SH100

14.2MP digital compact camera

$199

www.samsung.com

“Connectivity”, it’s one of the new buzzwords we keep hearing from camera makers as smartphones and camera phones take bigger and bigger chunks from markets previously more friendly to point and shoot cameras. The problem isn’t so much the quality of the camera on a typical smartphone, because most aren’t great, rather they’re good enough. But in today’s world of social sharing sites like, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Flickr, the phone’s ability to connect to the internet either by wi-fi or cellular allows that camera to be much more useful. It allows photographers to share what they’re seeing, what they’re feeling, where they’re visiting, instantly…at the touch of a button. After all, most of us take photos to share with other people, like our friends, our family….and nothing makes that more easy than a camera equipped smartphone.

Contrast that with your typical point and shoot. You take the pictures, but then you have to transfer them, and that requires digging out a USB cable, or taking out the memory card, and then a transfer process, and maybe then you can share what you’ve seen. In short, it’s a bit of a pain, so many people don’t bother with the point and shoot, and why would you if you have a nice smartphone?

Enter the Samsung SH100. Introduced right before this year’s CES in Las Vegas, the SH100 is not only wi-fi friendly, but also goes out of its way to mimic the smartphone experience complete with a large touchscreen interface. As a point and shoot camera, the SH100 is not all that exciting, offering a 14.2MP sensor, 5x zoom lens, 720p HD video, and a 230K resolution LCD. What Samsung hopes you’ll focus on though is its “connectivity”. Take a photo with the SH100 and you can share that photo on FaceBook with the press of a button. Take a video, and it can be posted on YouTube, or how about backing up your photos to your PC with no USB cable necessary, again wi-fi makes it possible. The connectivity doesn’t end there either, as Samsung has ratcheted up the gee-whiz factor of the SH100 by linking the SH100 to other electronic devices, like your TV and your phone…provided they’re made by Samsung. Using DLNA the SH100 can connect to your TV (or other DLNA equipped devices) and stream its media wirelessly. Have a Samsung Galaxy S phone? If you do, you can download an app from the Android Market, that enables you to use the phone as a remote viewfinder for the SH100. Control the zoom, fire the camera, and transfer the captured image from the camera to the phone, pretty cool right? Well, maybe.

Specifications
Camera	Samsung SH100
Street Price	$199
Sensor	14.2MP 1/2.33″ (Approx. 7.76cm) CCD
AF System	TTL auto focus (Multi AF, Center AF, Smart Face Recognition AF, Face Detection AF, Smart Touch AF, One Touch Shooting AF)
ISO Range	80-3200
Continuous Shooting	Approx. 1fps
LCD	3″ LCD Rear Touch Screen (230,000 pixels)
Lens	5x zoom 4.7-23.5mm (35mm equivalent: 26-130mm) | Aperture: f/3.3 (W) – 5.9 (T)
Shooting Modes	Smart Auto, Program, Smart Movie, Scene, Beauty Shot, Magic Frame, Photo Filter, Movie Filter, Night, Palette Effect, Close up, Simple Shot, Object Highlight
Scene Modes	e-Portrait, Portrait, Landscape, Night scene, Night+Portrait, Sport, Indoor, Self portrai, Sunset, Fireworks, Multi Exposure, Cuisine, Documents, Beach and Snow, Underwater Wide, Underwater Macro, Pet, Panorama
Video	1280 x 720 @ 30fps, 15 fps | mono sound | H.264 compression (.mp4)
Output	USB 2.0, AV Output
Storage	microSD, microSDHC
Dimensions	3.66 x 2.13 x 0.75″ / 9.3 x 5.4 x 1.9cm
Weight	3.89 oz / 110.2g

Technical Analysis

First, let’s get the technicals out of the way. The SH100 features a 14.2MP 1/2.33″ CCD sensor paired to a 5x zoom lens (26-130mm) lens, making for a competent, but not overly exciting tandem. The SH100 does a pretty nice job at taking pleasing photos, but as with so many point and shoots a lot depends on how closely you look at your files. Printed results and full screen viewing are your best bets, because here the SH100 captures look sharp, nicely saturated, and generally pretty appealing to the eye. Take a look at the captures at 100% and things break down some…what looked like fairly clean files now reveal noise and noise reduction efforts even at ISO 80, and after ISO 800 things get downright scary, though we’ll admit this is generally the way it is with all point and shoot cameras with tiny sensors and higher megapixel counts. Other typical P&S weaknesses are also exhibited by the SH100, highlights are easily blown out, shadows are getting crunched, and fine detail is replaced by a mushy imitation of “detail”. The SH100 also has several other weakness typical of point and shoot cameras including some excessive WB warmth in incandescent light (though overall quite good) and lens distortion and vignetting at its lens’ widest setting. In short, yes… you can expect to get pretty pictures from the SH100, just don’t look at them too closely and don’t expect superior results relative to other compact cameras.

Camera performance too is largely average, hindered mostly by the continuous shooting rate that for us was good for roughly 1 fps. No, that isn’t fast, but at least the burst depth seems essentially unlimited. Startup times are pretty responsive though, and general camera operation feels snappy enough, including shot to shot times. Focusing times are responsive, and the results are reliable regardless of the focusing option chosen. The SH100 provides several fun options, including touch to focus, macro, face detection, blink detection, smile detection, even a self-portrait option, and all work quite well. The SH100′s biggest problem here lies with some rather substantial shutter delay, press the shutter release and it could take almost a half second till the SH100 actually fires the shot.

The Samsung SH100 In the Hands

The SH100 features a largely plastic construction that’s sturdy enough to spend considerable time in your pocket, bag, or purse, but not so much that you’d ever want it to fall from your hands. And that could be an issue, as the SH100 offers nearly no grip, excepting two ridges on its rear where the thumb would rest. With its small size and texture-less surface you’ll want to make sure you immediately attach the included wrist strap and make a point of using it as well. Overall ergonomics are as good as they can be considering its box-like exterior, it’s comfortable in the hands, and controls are a non-issue since the SH100 offers only its touchscreen for interacting with it.

And what about that touchscreen? Thankfully the 3 inch 230k works pretty well, especially on a model like the SH100 where the intended user (i.e. not advanced photographers) will never miss having more physical controls. To be clear, there are a couple of actual controls, a playback button, a “Home” button, and the on/off switch, but outside that, everything else is done via the touchscreen. To simplify the user experience, Samsung has cleverly made the SH100 very cellphone-like in its interface, you’re presented with large touch friendly icons, and you can finger swipe your way through the various options. The touchscreen is pretty responsive and the interface is setup in such a way that most changes can be made pretty simply. There are a few minor issues though, with one in particular worth mentioning. Despite being oriented to “leave it in AUTO” photographers, the SH100 still offers some level of control (and even offers a versatile Program shooting mode) of things like autofocus settings, ISO, and exposure compensation, but it’s here that the touchscreen interface can be tricky. These settings are accessed from your shooting screen (as opposed to the “Home” screen) by pressing a virtual “menu” button. That activates a vertically scrolling menu that one moves up and down by finger swiping. The problem is the finger swipe is easily confused with a finger press, so where you intend to scroll through options, you’re instead pressing an option. It can get a bit annoying, especially when you just want to see what your options are. Not having a physical multi-selector here becomes a real issue, so at least here, Samsung may want to consider retooling things a bit.

Otherwise the SH100 is rather smartly done. Sure, typing in email addresses can be a pain, but no more so than any smartphone lacking an acutal keyboard. For most actions the interface Samsung has implemented works quite well, and if you do have trouble using your finger to control it, the SH100 does include a stylus that can be attached to your wriststrap for improved accuracy. We never personally felt the need to use it, and outside the exception provided above, we never felt like we were “missing” any physical controls either, which is impressive given the SH100 offers more in the way of interactive features and functions than you might expect.

Samsung SH100: The Fun Stuff

As we just intimated, the SH100 offers a lot of functionality, even excepting its wi-fi abilities. Granted, most photographers will likely use the SH100 set to AUTO or Program, but there are a handful of scenario specific “Scene” modes available too, like “Landscape”, “Sun”, “Dawn”, “Backlight”, and “Beach & Snow”, in addition to a number of more fun or creative type shooting options. These options include  customizable “Vignetting” , “Beauty Shot”, “Photo Filter”, and “Palette Effect” creative shooting modes, a cheesy “Magic Frame” effect that surrounds your captures with a decorative or pictorial type “frame”, and several more modes that offer sliders to adjust color or brightness. We could do without a few of these, but we had a good time with “Photo Filter” and “Palette Effect”, and regardless, our point is just that there’s more to the SH100 than just good ol’ AUTO mode.

And then there’s that wi-fi functionality. Compatible with “b”, “g”, and “n” type wi-fi networks, the SH100 does a nice job of allowing you to connect to your local network, while offering some interesting capabilities to exploit that connection. For most of us, priority one would be sharing our images, and that’s easily done with the SH100. With options for Facebook, email, Picasa, Photobucket, and YouTube, you can easily select one or more photos to upload in addition to movies. The process involves selecting a sharing location from playback mode, at which point the SH100 will then connect to your local wi-fi location. This process takes about 10 seconds as the SH100 searches for a network and either logs into it if you’ve used it before, or prompts you for a password if you haven’t. If you’re sending an email, you can type out an entry just as you would on a typical smartphone, if you’re posting on Facebook, you’ll be prompted for your user info (it remembers it for future use), either way, the SH100 then documents the file transfer process, and presto…you’ve got a connected camera! For us the average time for posting a picture to Facebook was just under 40 seconds, most of which is actually more related to logging into both the network and Facebook then actually transferring the file.

Sharing video and captures isn’t the only trick up the SH100′s sleeve, it also allows you to back up your images to a PC (and PC only unfortunately) and even use the SH100 as a “remote viewfinder” if (and that’s a big “if”) you have a Samsung Galaxy S phone. The PC Auto Back-up function uses your PC’s wake-on-LAN ability to transfer images from the SH100 to a folder of your choosing on the PC. It took a few restarts for us (the feature requires a software install), but afterwards it worked as advertised. The remote viewfinder functionality is a bit trickier. We don’t have a Samsung Galaxy S phone, but did manage to examine the functionality on a colleague’s phone. Using the functionality does require the use of the Galaxy S phone and it must have Android 2.2 (or higher) installed on it. If you meet those criteria, download Samsung’s free Remote Viewfinder app from the Android Market. Once installed, you’ll need to enable the SH100′s remote viewfinder function so that it can connect to the phone, but once that’s done you can then use your Galaxy S to compose photos, control the SH100′s 5x zoom, adjust flash and timer settings, focus, and yes…fire the SH100. At that point the file is saved to the camera and to the phone complete with GPS information, though we’ll point out that we did note a delay in the transfer of the 2MP file that gets saved to the phone. Other than that transfer delay, the controls are pretty instantaneous.

Image Samples

We’ve attached a few image samples to provide you with an idea of what the Samsung SH100 is capable of. For further examples check out our full-size JPEG ISO samples and the original full-size image samples.

It Takes Video Too

The SH100 is by no means a videographer’s dream tool, but it is capable enough to put some decent video quality on YouTube. You can choose from “Smart Movie” mode, which is essentially a full AUTO mode, or use the standard “Movie” mode which does allow control over exposure compensation, and white balance, and even enables the use of a variety of creative-type digital filters. For HD video, the SH100 films at 1280 x 720 at 30fps or 15 fps using H.264 compression with files saved out in the .mp4 format. There are two quality levels for HD video and the SH100 does provide lower resolutions for the bandwidth challenged and for using some of its more intensive digital filter effects. Video recording involves focusing with a half-pressed shutter and a tap of a virtual record button or full press of the shutter release to start the recording. You do have access to the optical zoom lens, but that use is greatly limited by the lack of continuous focus. We’ve provided some video clips below to give you a sense of the SH100′s video quality

Final Opinion

Samsung SH100

likes:

Compact size

Fun creative options

User friendly interface

dislikes:

Picasa access, but not Flickr

Lengthy shutter delay

Poor low light performance

Taken just as a point and shoot camera, the Samsung SH100 is merely an average overall performer. It takes visually pleasing photos, provides decent HD video, all packed in an attractive, but non-descript compact body that fits nicely in your pocket.

Of course the SH100 does offer more than that, for one, it provides a lot of in-camera creative options for both stills and video, then there’s the easy to use touchscreen, and the SH100′s familiar smartphone-like interface. More notably perhaps is the SH100′s trump card, its wi-fi connectivity, that allows you to share photos and video with friends and family, backup images to your PC, view its images on DLNA devices in your living room, and use the camera as a remote viewfinder…provided you have a Samsung Galaxy S Phone. The touchscreen/interface/wi-fi tandem in many ways make the SH100 work and feel a lot like your smartphone, which means for many point-and-shoot photographers the SH100 will have a familiar feel to it.

So is it a point-and-shoot on steroids, a smartphone companion, or the beginning of some new hybrid category? Perhaps a bit of all three, but the real question should be, is the SH100 for you? Since many 5x zoom cameras with similar or even better image quality are available for less, it’s difficult to give the SH100 a “Highly Recommended” rating. And any potential purchaser of the SH100 will have to consider just how connected they are or need to be. The ability to share photos is now in many people’s pocket in the form of a smartphone, and while the SH100 does take a better picture than any camera phone we can think of, I’m still not convinced that it’s so much superior that one needs two devices in your pocket. Also note the SH100 is wi-fi only, while smartphones can obviously also connect via their cellular networks… that’s a lot more territory than just wi-fi alone.

So not “Highly Recommended” but the SH100 is more than adept enough to earn a “Recommended” rating. This compact, attractive point-and-shoot offers an easy to use interface, wi-fi connectivity, creative in-camera options, and does take a nice photo. For many consumers the SH100 will duplicate some of you smartphone’s functionality, but for many others, the SH100 will be a clever solution for quickly sharing your photographs and video with friends, family, and fans.

CGG Editor’s Rating:
value:
7
design:
7
features:
8
performance:
6
image quality:
7

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