Samsung EX1

Spectacularfor its class

Digital Camera Review: Samsung EX1
by Trevor Tan
05:55 AM Aug 13, 2010

JUST how good is the Samsung EX1 ($699)? To find out, I left my digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) camera in the hotel room and used the EX1 to shoot pictures and videos when I was on a recent overseas assignment, which required me to walk about in huge event halls.

Slightly bigger than an iPod Classic and weighing 356g (without battery and memory card), the EX1 is compact and light enough for you to carry around without experiencing shoulder aches.

The camera is armed with a 10-megapixel image sensor, a 3-inch rotating AMOLED screen and a 3x (24-72mm of 35mm equivalent) optical zoom lens with a large aperture of f/1.8. This is probably the sturdiest digital compact camera I've reviewed. It boasts a solid metallic shell and a rubberised grip.

The design might look complicated at first glance but the positioning of its buttons is actually really intuitive. There is a bracket switch, a mode dial and a lens zoom lever on the top right, and a flash switch on the top left. However, the flash is not very powerful and could not provide much fill-light.

A scroll wheel and some buttons (such as one for video recording) sit on the rear right, allowing your thumb to handle them easily. You can use the front dial along with the rear scroll wheel to change aperture and shutter speed settings in Manual model quickly - a feature some entry-level DSLRs do not even have.

With the lens protruding mechanism, the EX1 takes up to 2.3 seconds to power up and some 1.6 seconds to shut down. Shutter lag is minimal and auto focus (AF) operation swift. With the AF assist light on, it takes less than a second to lock on a focus in poor lighting. Shot-to-shot interval clocks approximately 1.8 seconds.

The picture quality is superb for a camera of this class - there's acute pixel rendition, nice details, smooth skin tones. Colour reproduction is spot on, with accurate auto white balance. However, the pictures are a tad soft compared to the ones taken on DSLRs. Noise performance is excellent, with chromatic noise appearing only at ISO 800. Even at ISO 1600, the pictures are still usable, unless you need big prints.

Even if you have to shoot at high ISO, you can always shoot in RAW format to allow more latitude to remove noise artifacts during post-processing. The only caveat is that it's in Samsung's proprietary RAW format. While RAW processing software - such as Aperture and Lightroom - will support the EX1 in the future, you can only use the included software to convert the RAW files for now.

Many camera manufacturers have started implementing SDXC card support but the EX1 supports only up to SDHC. Maybe that's why the EX1 can only shoot 640x480 videos at 30 frames per second. So, no HD video recording on this one. Videos shot look sharp but suffer from excessive ambient audio - a problem most digital compact cameras face. TREVOR TAN

http://www.todayonline.com/Tech/Techreviews/EDC100813-0000118/Spectacularfor-its-class

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