Samsung HZ15W

Shooting Modes (14.17)

For those of you who crave every shooting mode imaginable, including a fair few manual controls, then Samsung has you in mind. That said, there are a few modes missing that someone with an advanced photographic background might notice. In its favor, it has a manual mode, where you can control the shutter speed completely, and set the aperture to either minimum or maximum. What’s missing, though, is aperture or shutter priority modes, which are present in the Canon compact ultrazooms. The Panasonic compact ultrazooms, on the other hand, don’t have any manual exposure modes.

On the more automatic side of things, there’s program mode, auto, smart auto (scene recognition), movie, scene mode, beauty shot, and dual IS. Of the scene modes, most are rather boring, but one deserves some elaboration. It’s called frame guide, and it’s used when you want to hand over your camera to someone else to take a shot, but you want them to use a composition of your choosing. The way it works: you set up the shot to your tastes, and take the photo. A slightly translucent frame is then composed of the outer edge of this photo, which allows the person you’ve handed your camera to match the camera up exactly with how the last photo was taken, while you rush over to try and hold up the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

The other shooting mode worth discussing, if only to condemn it, is the terrifying beauty shot mode. In this mode, there are two settings, Face Tone and Face Retouch, both of which can be set to one of three levels. The first gives you ‘brighter skin,’ the second smears any topography of your face. Anyone subjected to this ends up looking like a black velvet portrait of Elvis, and the photos haunt us to this day.

Auto Mode Features

Focus

For your focusing pleasure, you can chose between center, multi or selection (using the four-way pad to decide where to focus). Additionally, there’s macro mode, and manual focus (which uses left and right on the four-way pad to focus, and helpfully enlarges the center of the frame to aid in getting things razor-sharp).

There is also a face recognition mode, which can also be set to self-portrait, where it will beep once your mug is in frame and in focus, so you know when to hit the shutter. Corollary to these are smile shot, which takes a photo when it detects a smile, and blink detection which will take three shots in quick succession if it spots a closed set of eyes.

Exposure

Exposure compensation runs the standard gamut of ±2 EV in 1/3 steps, and is controlled by a little slider on the back of the camera. Something that gets left out of many compact cameras, that we’re happy to see here, is the inclusion of auto exposure bracketing. It takes a shot with no compensation, then -1/3EV and finally +1/3EV.

Like almost every other camera on the market, there’s a dynamic range boosting tool, here called ACB (auto contrast balance). It can be used while shooting, or applied to an already taken image.

Metering

The standard array of metering choices: multi, center-weighted and spot.

White Balance

The camera has presets for daylight, cloudy, daylight fluorescent, white fluorescent and tungsten. Also included are automatic and manual.

Aperture

At wide angle the aperture runs f/3.3 to f/7.5. Zoomed all the way in, it’s f/5.8 to f/13.1. These compact ultrazooms tend not to have blindingly fast lenses, so this is about what you’ll see in most comparable models.

We like the fact that you have some control over the aperture, via the manual shooting mode, but we wish it was over the entire range of apertures, rather than just being able to chose between the maximum and minimum.

Shutter Speed

The shutter speed range on the HZ15W is decent, but not fantastic. The highest speed could be better (it only reaches 1/1500 of a second), but the maximum exposure of 16 seconds is a healthy length for a compact camera. There is the added bonus of being able to manually set the exposure length across this entire range in manual mode.

Self-Timer

This camera has a fair few different timer modes. There’s the usual 10- and 2-second modes, plus the handy 10 then 2 mode, which takes a photo after 10 seconds, then another two seconds later. Motion timer waits six seconds, then takes a photo as soon as everything stops moving. Finally, the camera is also compatible with an optional remote control, and will take a photo two seconds after you push the button on said remote.

Picture Effects (5.00)

In addition to the slightly horrific effects of beauty shot mode mentioned above, you can add a color cast to the image (red, green, blue or custom), shoot black and white, sepia or inverse while the standard photo modes. Sharpness, brightness and contrast can also be tweaked.

Drive/Burst Mode (6.50)

There are quite a few drive/burst modes on the camera. You have access to single shot, continuous, high speed, auto exposure bracketing and motion capture. This last takes 6 shots per second for up to five seconds, but at 640×480 resolution.

Shot to Shot (3.04)

In High Speed mode, we captured an average of 1.6 frames per second, which is in keeping with Samsung’s stated speed of 1.5 frames per second with this setting.