Samsung L73 First Impressions Review

by Richard Baguley
Published on January 08, 2007

Navigation
Intro	Physical Tour
Components	Design / Layout
Modes	Control Options
Image Parameters	Connectivity / Extras
Overall Impressions	Conclusion

 

Connectivity
Software
Samsung supplies their Digimax Master software with the camera. It is a basic image editing and cataloging program. This can also scan images taken in the camera’s text mode and try to convert them to raw text.

Jacks, Ports, Plugs
The camera itself doesn’t have any USB or video outputs. Instead, all of these are located in the camera dock that connects to the proprietary socket at the bottom of the camera. This wasn’t available for examination at CES, but Samsung claims it will have a USB 2.0 port,  mono audio outputs and a composite video output that can be switched between the NTSC and PAL TV standards.

Direct Print Options
The PictBridge 1.0 standard is supported and allows the camera to connect directly to an appropriately equipped printer. Images can also be flagged for later printing using the DPOF standard. This is all pretty standard stuff.

Battery
The small SLB-0837 battery holds 860 mAh of charge and can be charged in the camera. Samsung didn’t supply any figures for battery life, and we weren’t able to test this at the CES show.

Memory
SD Cards and HDSC cards with capacities of up to 4GB are supported. 20MB of memory is also built into the camera, and images can be copied between the two.

Other Features
Voice recording – Audio clips of up to an hour can be captured through the built-in microphone.

Face Recognition AF & AE - The L73 includes a face recognition feature that gives preference to faces it detects in images, in theory ensuring that they are correctly focused and exposed. Samsung claims it can detect up to 9 faces in an image, but we weren’t able to test this feature beyond a couple of shots that were correctly focused and exposed.