Customer Reviews

Samsung Digimax S1050 10.1MP Digital Camera with 5x Advance Shake Reduction Optical Zoom (Black)

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

I did a great deal of previewing of the current crop of digital cameras before this Samsung S1050.

Some of the selling points for me, were the high MP, the higher quality movie encoding, and the large LCD screen.

There is a good level of detail in the photos, the colors are true to life, and the portability of the camera is decent. The skies were less grainy than with some digital cameras, a common problem.

The movie mode could be better, but it is better than the average for a digital camera.

The large LCD screen is great for shots of smaller moving subjects.

Please note: You will need high powered NIHM rechargable batteries for this camera, as with most higher end cameras and especially as the S1050 takes only two batteries. I recommend buying four high powered NIHMs, and a recharger that can handle four batteries at a time, that way you'll always be ready for a shot.

I am a novice photographer with some photo experience, and no experience with a digital point and shoot (past camera was an old 35mm Canon AE-1).

After searching for a few weeks looking at reviews and prices I purchased this camera, and am pretty happy. I looked at many 6-8MP editor's pick camera's from CNET and most of them were close to the same price as this one.

Thanks to the lone dissenter in the review section concerning battery life. If it wasn't for them I wouldn't have bought this camera. I am happy I did.

I just received the camera today and played with it for a couple of hours, so I will write another review in a few weeks.

This camera does eat batteries, but not at the rate previously described. I inserted the batteries and played with it for about two hours changing settings, powering on and off, and taking photo's with the flash on. It would probably last for about 40-70 photo with flash and no settings changes. This is just a guess though, no way of knowing until I do more shooting.

I chose this camera because my fiance is wary of cameras with too many settings and I want to be able to control every aspect of the camera when I want to. This camera will do both and everything in between.

Zoom is awesome on this camera, you could be in the back of a school auditorium and still zoom for a normal looking photo. Pictures look great, although I have yet to print one. Macro mode is super cool, although it is very hard to keep the camera from shaking at such high zooms. It could just be me being shaky, but it is noticeable.

All and all I'm really satisfied.

If your planning on buying this camera look around for the package deal here on amazon. I got the camera, a case, a mini tripod, a 2GB card, a 5 in 1 card reader, a cleaning kit, screen protectors, rechargeable batteries with a charger, an extended 3 year warranty, and 25 free photo's for only 261 bucks including shipping. The charger isn't the hottest (takes sixteen hours) but all the rest is good. I suggest the sony BCG-34HVE4, it comes with a car adapter and 4 batteries, and only takes 3-5 hours to charge.

Long review I know, thanks for reading...hope it helps. Good luck in your hunt for a camera. Mine is finally over.

I just purchased this camera last week. I shopped long and hard and visited every website on photography that ever existed, plus every brick-and-mortar photography store in town. I selected it b/c I wanted a pocketable camera w/some decent zoom, more megapixels (my old one has 7), a bigger LCD screen, that would still take SD cards and AA batteries (getting rarer and rarer). I did actually buy it from Amazon, b/c it was nearly the best price -- and it didn't seem worth saving ten bucks to buy from some random website I'd never heard of.
So far, the pictures have been fantastic, and under some difficult shooting situations (like my daughter's play, where she's moving about onstage and I'm in a dark auditorium). I'm no photography expert, just a mom who wants great pictures of her kids, and vacations, and some "artsy" stuff as well. My mom (who generally shoots great pics) and I took pics in the same situation (the play), and hers were a blurry mess w/her year-old Nikon Coolpix L-something. The Samsung's Anti-Shake Reduction technology really makes the difference.
Even the video seems like pretty good quality.
Some small complaints:
--The batteries do run out fairly fast (but not 10 pics as previously reviewed), so always carry spares and invest in rechargeables if you haven't already!
--The real manual is on CD only, which is annoying -- I don't want to print out 102 pages; it is too much to ask for THEM to do it? But whatever. A small basic one is included, to get you started.
--The measurements listed on every single website are just wrong. They don't include "protrusions", and so what good is that? The protrusions are indeed THERE! So I painstakingly measured the camera (when in between sixteenths I rounded up), and here are the REAL measurements:
W: 4 3/16 in. H: 2 9/16 in. D: 1 3/4 in
So, overall, I really like it a lot so far. I would have given 4.5 stars if that were an option, but I rounded up b/c one of the previous reviewers was so low!

This camera has lots of great features, an INCREDIBLY powerful flash, large LCD, takes 10mp pictures AND can be purchased for less than $200. So yes, to get all of that, there is a trade off which is an appitite for power. You must use good quality rechargable AA batteries. If you try to put duracells from your junk drawer in the camera, it will eat them like candy. After reading all the reviews about what a battery eater it was, I bought a second set of rechargables just to have on hand. I bought this camera on a Thursday night and put a set of rechargables in it then. I played with it for a couple of hours on thursday,friday and saturday. Sunday, I took it to the zoo with the family and packed an extra set of batteris just in case. I took over 100 pics and never had to change out the batteries. Monday I took my camera to work and showed several coworkers my pics on my camera before the batteries died. For the features, the quality of pictures, and the price, I don't really mind recharging batteries every 100 pics or so.

This is my third digital camera. I have an Canon digicam with a 12x optical zoom but I wanted something pocketable to take on bike rides and around town, so the Samsung is an adjunct rather than a replacement. I didn't want to spend a lot of money but wanted something decent. The Samsung was 1/3 to a 1/4 the price of top brand cameras with similar specifications. The salesman in the electronics superstore sneered and made a disparaging remark when I expressed interest in the Samsung - but I bought it anyway. It exceeds my expectations.

Cons: It is *just* pocketable - lucky I have large shirt and suit pockets. It used the alkaline batteries in the box in about 20 shots but that didn't worry me as I always intended to use hi-capacity nicads. The power usage is to be expected as it has a large screen and runs off two AA batteries.

The symbols on the buttons and multi-function dial are black (same as the plastic case) and impossible to see in dim light. It is reasonably heavy and does weigh down my pockets.

The auto shake reduction is not a true anti-shake system. It merely increases the ISO and hence shutter speed automatically, resulting in higher noise. Still, you can't expect electronic or mechanical shake reduction at this price point.

Pros: The camera feels solid and-well made and is comfortable in the hand, The large 3" LCD takes up most of the back of the camera. The 5x optical zoom is more useful than the usual 3x.

I took identical photos on the Canon and the Samsung. There is no noticable difference between them. Colour rendering and sharpness were perfect. The Samsung in some areas has a greater range of adjustments than the Canon - it is certainly not lacking in manual adjustments. The Samsung doesn't have a panorama function but this is a minor point as you can still take panoramas and use open-source stitching software. It has a macro function that takes photos to within 1 cm of the lens, i.e., actually touching the lens surround. The flash is quite powerful. The tripod mount is metal rather than plastic.

Summary: An excellent camera that takes quality pictures. It's not tiny or especially light but it is particularly good value for money.

December 2008: I've been using the camera frequently for 12 months. I stand by my comments above. My only reservation is shutter lag and being slow writing to memory. Actually, very slow. However I believe most small digicams are like that.

This camera was on sale. I guess it is because of some review who give lower rating. After purchase I was amazed with the performance of the Camera. I took the picture at night without any light. I couldn't believe the picture as if I took in daytime. I don't need big flash any more. This is my third digital camera. All the camera I had ate battery fast. I don't have any complaint about the battery problem. This is the best camera with the best price. I thank you the guys who wrote negative review and give the chance to buy this camera with good price.

Got mine from Woot and received it today. Heard my Blackberry go off with a message from FedEx. Said the package was here. Opened the front door and lo! There it was. The 200 shot Red Ryder BB gun with built in compass and sundial. No wait, I mean the camera. Looked down the street in time to see the FedEx truck turn the corner. Talk about real-time updates.

Brought the package in. It was below freezing outside. Convinced myself to let the package get warmer before opening. Decided after 30 seconds it was warm enough. The camera came in a neat retail box. Everything inside was packaged nicely. Popped in some old rechargables into the camera. Popped the included alkaline batts into my shaver. Perfect. Put in a 2Gb chip and tried to format it. Camera says "format failure". Tried another chip. That one worked. No worries. Took a few test shots.

Indoor pics taken with flash on worked very well. The flash is *bright*. Flash recharge time is about 3-4 seconds. During that time, the screen goes dark and you can't do anything with it. Pictures taken indoors without flash generally turned out well, but a steady hand (or nearby wall to lean against) helps a lot. My old Sony DSC-P92 (5Mpix) did better under similar conditions, tending to choose faster shutter speeds so shake is less of a problem.

With a 2gig chip, the camera reports space for 370+ pictures at the 10 Mpix superfine setting, or 1h 20 min of video at 720x640 @ 30 fps. 2 gig probably works fine under most circumstances. Still, I'd go for the biggest chip I can afford. if you're going on a vacation its nice not to have to worry about running out of memory. I took 500+ pics at 5Mpix when I spent 5 days in Hawaii.

Took it to the park. Pictures outdoors are pretty good. I found the shot-to-shot time a little long when trying to follow the antics of a vigorous subject (read: 2 yr old Aussie Shepard. Tends to move much faster than your average subject. Your mileage may vary).

As a definite and unexpected bonus, I also found this to be a reasonably good video camera. At 720 x 480 @ 30 fps, the video tends towards DV quality. Media Player Classic (part of the K-lite codec pack) says that the video codec is XVID 720x480 30.00fps 1771Kbps, while audio is MS ADPCM 22050Hz mono 88Kbps [Audio 1]. Motion artifacts during a fast pan are noticable if you look for it, but otherwise the image is sharp at native resolution. With almost 100 mins of video recording capability, Samsung is at least within sight of that Holy Grail of digital media devices: good quality still pictures and video in one compact package.

Audio was a little soft. It also cuts off when zooming, presumably so you don't hear the zoom and AF motors humming. When taking video, AF has difficulty catching up during a zoom. The image goes out of focus during the zoom, then comes back into focus when zoom stops.

Transferring images was easy. Windows XP (Vista? Ha!) recognized it as a mass storage device without having to install any drivers. The included cable connects to the camera with something even smaller than a miniUSB plug. The connection was uncomfortably tight. It takes some carefully controlled tugging to pull it out from the camera after transferring pictures. The rubber plug covering the USB port is also little too close and interferes when you try to plug the cable in.

Battery life was decent. I used a pair of 3-year old Duracells rated at 2000mAh. The last time I charged it was 2 weeks ago. It lasted me all afternoon, or about 275 Mb of data, or 78 stills and about 5 mins of video total. It died sometime this evening when I was going through the results. Really people, that's pretty decent batt life.

Something nobody seems to have mentioned: Be careful when opening or closing the battery door. It's held closed by a grey plastic tongue (door part) through a square loop of black plastic or metal (hard to tell). If you break this, you can't close the door, the batteries lose contact, and the camera becomes unusable.

Many reviews have panned the image noise level. You do get noise if you zoom all the way in. However, almost all picture viewing is done either on a display screen or printed out on photo paper. At max res, it works out to about 300 dpi when printing a letter sized picture. dpi goes even higher for smaller prints. Pixel level noise can be difficult to see at this resolution, assuming they even remain as discrete dots on an inkjet.

The average screen does not display all 10 Mpix at native resolution. If you have a halfway decent image viewer, the image is nicely interpolated and scaled to fit the screen. The result becomes spectactular, since the scaled image is effectively supersampled from the original.

Overall, this camera is great for taking casual snaps and videos. It's compact enough that I can take it with me anywhere. I especially like the fact that I can get both decent quality video and stills on one device. Neither are of record breaking quality, but the convenience factor means I'm more likely to bring this than two separate devices. Plus, you can't beat the feature set for a hundred and twenty bucks (Woot). I think was worth what I paid for it.


It's been a week since getting this, and I've found out a few more things about this camera. There has been many conflicting comments about battery life on this camera, so I decided to do a test. I bought a set of brand Energizer rechargables rated at 2500 mAh. I charged them for 5 hours on a Duracell Rechargable-Accu 4-channel charger (i.e. full charge). Next, I put two batteries into the camera with an empty chip, then pointed it out the window at a street scene and set the camera to record video.

After 1 hour 20 mins, the chip was full and recording stopped. The battery indicator was still full. I deleted the file, then started another video recording. 1 hour 55 mins into the process, I looked at the viewfinder and the battery indicator had turned red. Almost exactly 2 hours later, the camera shutdown due to low battery. Note that this was a controlled shutdown (i.e. lens retracted etc).

So it would appear that with decent rechargable batteries, runtime exceeds the chip's recording capacity. Running full out capturing video with the LCD display on all the time, I got a total of 2 hours on a set of brand new batteries. After turning the camera off and immediately turning it back on again, the battery indicator went up by a bar. I would expect you can probably get more with normal usage patterns.

I bought 5 of these of Christmas presents now just a little over a year later only one works mostly due to the fact that it's owner does not use it much. Battery problems, overheating etc. Avoid. I am a die hard Samsung fan but this is a bad camera.

A 10mp, 5x zoom, 3inch lcd display,super macro mode, program mode, aperture priority, shutter priority, and full manual modes for more creative and advanced shots, all for under $200! This camera is loaded with fun features as well, such as stickers, frames, and different color modes. It takes amazing pictures, especially when using the diffent manual modes. For the price this camera is hard to beat. Reason i did not give it a 5, is due to batteries do not last as long even with rechargables. One more thing for continuous shots is pretty slow.

Not the best, not the worst, but for the money---one of the best values in a point and shoot with pretty decent capabilities.
If you are a PRO, you're not looking at this. If you only want a take along, you could do better with a smaller, smoother bodied camera that is easier to get out and get the shot with no thought.
However, if you are like me, someone that will occasionally want to do something interesting with what I learned in my college photography class, this camera is ideal.
Very good quality -- both pictures and the camera build.
Like anything worthwhile, take the time to get to know it. It will serve you well. I still miss my Seiko (Epson L-500V), but this one's working out just fine.