We tried out a very pre-production version of the newly announced SL420 from Samsung at CES this week. Don't know the price or an exact ship date, but we're intrigued by a few surprising and useful features. Here's an early sneak peek.
Auto Mode Auto mode locks out any user input beyond turning face detection and or off and selecting a photo style if desired, while program mode adds exposure compensation, white balance setting selection metering mode choice and burst mode.There is also a Smart Auto mode, an increasingly popular feature among point-and-shoot manufacturers, which allows the camera to analyze the scene at hand and assign it automatically to one of the built-in custom scene modes.
Movie Mode The SL420 can shoot at 640x480 or 320x240 resolution, at 30 or 15 frames per second, storing the resulting video in compact MPEG4 format. While shooting video, control over metering mode, photo style, optical image stabilization, audio on/off and exposure compensation are all available.
Drive / Burst Mode Burst mode shooting will be available, but it was not yet enabled in the pre-production model we tested.
Playback Mode During playback mode stored photos can be magnified up to 11.4x, a slightly higher enlargement than typically found in compact cameras. There is a photo cropping option built into this enlarged view capability: if your image is displayed on screen just the way you like it, hit the Trim control and a cropped version of the photo will be saved.
Custom Image Presets There are 12 custom scene modes, including frame guide, night, portrait, children, landscape, close-up text, sunset, dawn, backlight, fireworks and beach & snow. As with many camera functions, the effect of each choice is explained through an on-screen text description, though we expect there may be some editing between our pre-production sample and the final product. For example, the Children scene mode description read, "This mode is appropriate for shooting actively moving children."
