Samsung TL34HD Digital Camera First Impressions Review - Samsung Point and Shoot and Non-DSLR

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Manual Control Options
The TL34HD has a limited, but usable set of manual controls. To use this, you rotate the mode dial to M, then set the shutter and aperture directly. However, you cannot alter both easily; you have to do one, then the other. There is no shutter or aperture priority mode; you just get the choice of program, a scene mode or full manual

Focus
Auto Focus
We found the auto focus of the TL34HD to be generally responsive in our tests; the camera quickly found the right focus point in the well-lit conference hall at Photokina. However, it did seem to have some issues when we tried to focus on the darker parts of the hall, hunting for the focus but sometimes failing. We'll need to do more tests before we can decide if this is a real issue or just a quirk of the lighting.

ISO
The ISO range goes from 80 at the low end up to 1600. An option for 3200 is available, but the resolution is then restricted to 3 megapixels. That's a decent range which should allow for shooting in most lighting situations, and there is also an Auto mode, where the camera makes the call.

White Balance
A limited number of white balance settings is available; daylight, cloudy, Fluorescent_H, Fluorescent_L, Tungsten and a custom setting that comes from a photo of a white object. Again, that should be more than enough for most users; most will simply set this on auto and not worry about it.

Metering
Options for multi, spot and center-weighted metering are available. If the face detection mode is enabled, the camera will use the detected faces to meter against.

Shutter Speed
In the auto mode, the shutter speed can range from 1/2000 of a second down to 1 second. This gets slightly expanded to 4 seconds in the firework scene mode. That's a pretty typical spread for a point-and-shoot camera like this.

Aperture
The aperture of the zoom lens goes from f/2.8 at the wide setting to f/5.9 at the telephoto end. The telephoto end is a little too small; you might have difficulty taking low-light shots with the zoom extended, as it won't gather as much light. Samsung did not specify the minimum aperture.

Image Stabilization
The TL34HD offers two image stabilization modes; an electronic mode that boosts the ISO and shutter speed, and an optical stabilization mode that moves an element of the lens to compensate for camera shake. Both of these modes can be enabled by setting the mode dial to the Dual setting, or one or the other can be enabled from the on-screen menu in most other modes. We were not able to test the efficacy of this, but we generally find that optical image stabilization produces better results.

Picture Quality / Size Options
The TL34HD offers three options for image quality; Super Fine, Fine or Normal. The options for image size range from the maximum of 4384 x 3266 pixels down to 1024 x 7688. At the highest quality and size, Samsung estimates that a 1GB memory card will hold 136 images.

Picture Effects Mode
A number of picture effects modes are on offer; you can set a number of photo styles (Normal, Soft, Vivid, Forest, Retro, Cool, Calm or Classic) or shoot in any one of seven color modes (Normal, B & W, Sepia, Blue, Red, Green or Negative). The sharpness, contrast and saturation of any of these modes can be tweaked by the user as well.

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Intro

Physical Tour

Components

Design / Layout

Modes

Control Options

Conclusion

Specs

Samsung TL34HD

Digital Camera Review