Samsung V50

The 5-megapixel Digimax V50 is entering
a pretty crowded marketplace, and on
the face of it there’s no single ‘killer
feature’ to help it stand out. Instead, its strength is
likely to be its combination of specifi cations and
price. It needs to offer a lot for the money.
Here’s the V50’s fi rst problem: £300 is pretty
good for a 5-megapixel camera with a full range
of PASM exposure modes and a 30fps VGA movie
mode, too. However, Samsung’s own V5 model
offers all of this and for around £40 less. The only
signifi cant difference between the V5 and the V50
appears to be the V50’s swivelling LCD display.
There are a couple of other interesting features
to pick out at this point. One is Samsung’s boast
that the V50 can run on nine different power
sources. In fact, it comes with a proprietary
lithium-ion cell (which is one of them), and unless
you run out of power unexpectedly, this is likely to
be all you’ll ever want to use.
If you do run out of power, though, you can
also slot in a lithium-ion CR-V3 cell or a pair of AA
cells (photo-lithium, NiMH, alkaline and so on –
the rest of the battery ‘types’ in other words). The
ability to slot in a couple of AAs could be a big
bonus if you forget to charge up the lithium-ion
cell properly before you go out.
The advantages of the V50’s dual memory card
slots – SD and Memory Stick – are harder to
fathom. Memory Sticks are the most expensive
card types of all, so you’re not likely to buy them
specifi cally for use in this camera. Memory Stick
compatibility might be an advantage if you own
other Sony equipment, but this feature still seems
more of a curiosity than a selling point.
The V50’s 640 x 480 pixel 30fps movie mode is
good, though, and a genuine alternative to a
digital camcorder for quick video snapshots.
The start-up time is reasonable at three
seconds, and the LCD display quality is very good.
The only complaint here is its slightly excessive
contrast – as we mention in the performance
panel, it might fool you into reshooting with
adjusted exposure settings simply because it
washes out a lot of highlight information that the
sensor records perfectly well. The swivelling
design helps with low-angle or waist-level shots,
though simple upward-hinged LCDs, like that on
the Minolta DiMAGE A2 or the old Olympus E20
are simpler for this kind of work.
The AF system’s a bit of a disappointment. It
can take up to a second to confi rm focus, even at
the wide-angle end of the zooming range. The
zoom action itself is a little noisy, but quick
enough. To activate the zoom, you press a rocker
switch on the back of the camera, and not the
rotating switch around the shutter release. That’s
the camera’s ‘jog dial’, and it does seem an
unnecessary complication.
In many of the modes, this jog dial doesn’t do
anything at all. In the Scene mode, for example,
you’d have thought it could be used to switch
between the nine different ‘scenes’ available. And
in the program AE mode, it could have been used
as a ‘program shift’ control to shift the balance of
shutter speed and aperture.
In shutter priority mode you do use the jog dial
to change the shutter speed, and it’s used to
change the aperture in aperture priority mode.
In manual mode, though, things get more
complicated. Here, both values are displayed
and you have to press the AEL button to switch
between the two for jog dial adjustments.
The V50 offers a lot of hands-on
photographic control – multiple metering
patterns, manual focus, PASM modes – but
then makes it just that little bit too fi ddly so
that you’re seldom likely to actually use this
stuff. On paper it looks good; in practice, it’s
another matter.
The Samsung does have an ‘S’ button, which
acts as a shortcut to some handy functions,
including EV compensation, exposure mode,
white balance and ISO. Nevertheless, the
control layout and design don’t do justice up to
what this camera is capable of. And that’s
actually quite a lot. Some cameras are packed
with features but then fail to deliver on image
quality – but the Samsung isn’t one of them. Its
image quality is well above average, and in a
number of different areas.
Detail rendition is one of them. There’s no
point paying through the nose for a big-name
5-megapixel model and expecting results
signifi cantly sharper than this, because it’s not
going to happen.
Image contrast and saturation are very
good, too. Many cameras produce fl at-looking
images the moment the sun goes in or they’re
presented with scenes that lack contrast, but
the Samsung’s images look punchy and bright,
even when the conditions aren’t. What’s more,
it achieves all this with commendably accurate
colour balance. The white balance control is
reasonably easy to get to on this camera, but
you’re not often likely to need it.
The only fl y in the ointment is a tendency
towards magenta fringing around bright
highlights. This is not chromatic aberration
caused by the lens – this is a different
phenomenon – but appears to be an electronic
CCD artefact common in digital sensors and
particularly in compact models. The Samsung
doesn’t suffer from it all the time, but when it
does you’ll know all about it.

Conclusions

Like many cameras in this price range, the
Digimax V50 is a mixed bag. The image quality
is good, especially for the money, but it’s in the
design and handling that it loses out to the
more prestigious marques.
With that in mind, some of the lesser
cameras in the range are perhaps more
attractive, principally because they’re
signifi cantly cheaper. The V5, for example, lacks
the swivelling LCD of the V50 but not much
else, while the original 4-megapixel V4 can
now be found for £230 or less.