Samsung HZ15W

Manual Controls

The Samsung HZ15W offers a full manual mode, although it does not offer separate Shutter Priority and Aperture Priority modes. It's nice to see a manual mode on the camera, but we have to say that we're not particularly happy with the method that Samsung has decided to implement to change between adjusting shutter speed and aperture. Toggling between the two is achieved by hitting the Function button and then pressing left/right on the d-pad. This seems clunky and it also means that all the other manual controls you might want to adjust like ISO, white balance, etc are two button presses away instead of one.

We like the full manual mode, but making adjustments is a bit annoying.

Focus

The Samsung HZ15W offers three different auto focus modes, whch can be changed the Function menu. Your options are Center AF, Selection AF, and Multi AF.

You can choose from three auto focus modes.

There's also a macro focus and manual focus on board. You toggle between the three types of focus by pressing down on the directional pad.

We're happy to see the inclusion of manual focus.

ISO

ISO can be adjusted via the Function menu and allows you to choose an ISO setting ranging from ISO 80 to ISO 3200. With most point and shoot cameras you probably don't want to push the ISO much above 400 or 800, although we'll have to wait until we have the camera in our labs to find out exactly how bad things get at higher ISO.

ISO ranges from 80 to 3200.

White Balance

White balance can be set in the Function menu. You can choose from Auto, Daylight, Cloudy, Fluorescent H, Fluorescent L, Tungsten, and a manual white balance mode.

Manual white balance is on board the HZ15W.

Metering

The Samsung HZ15W offers three different metering modes: Spot, Center-Weighted and Multi. The metering mode can be set in the Function menu.

There are three metering modes available.

Shutter Speed

The Samsung HZ15W's range of shutter speeds in manual mode is 16 seconds to 1/1500, nothing overly impressive.

Aperture

The Samsung HZ15W offers a fairly pedestrian maximum aperture of f/3.3 at the wide end and f/5.8 at the tele.

Image Stabilization

The Samsung HZ15W uses optical image stabilization to help steady your shots against camera shake, but also uses software adjustments to complement this. The optical image stabilization can be turned on/off in the main menu. If you do want to use both types of stabilization there's a Dual IS option on the mode dial. Frankly we'd stick with the optical image stabilization and make any software adjustments in your photo editing software.

Picture Quality & Size Options

The Samsung HZ15W takes photos at a maximum resolution of 12 megapixels. You can also choose 10, 9, 8, 5, 3 or 1 megapixels if you wish. The Samsung HZ15W's offers 3 quality options for images: Superfine, Fine and Normal.

Picture Effects

The Samsung HZ15W offers a wide range of picture effects that you can access by pressing the E button just below and to the right of the 4-way control. You can choose from Vivid, Soft, Forest, Retro, Cool, Calm, and Classic. If you know what those means please write and let us know with a comment below, as we have no idea. You can also make manual adjustments to Color, Sharpness, Contrast and Saturation here.

There are a bevy of picture effects available, but we don't know what they do.