Samsung TL34HD
Digital Camera Review
Nov 14, 2008
- By Tim Barribeau
2.4
The TL34HD from Samsung is their new touch-screen, 14.7-megapixel point-and-shoot camera. Housed in a sleek metal case, it wowed us with good to excellent results in almost every test we could throw at it, especially white balance and automatic noise. While it didn't fare as well in low light or in video mode as could be desired, the TL34HD delivered an all around excellent performance, a solid feature set with some degree of manual control, in an attractive package. It retails at $299 and seems to us to be good value for a strong camera. Full details follow.
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Connectivity
Software (3.00)
Samsung's included Samsung Master is a relatively basic image editor for the PC only (boo!) It's clunky, unintuitive, and has graphical effects that remind us of mid-nineties clip art. At the very least, it can handle most of your basic editing needs - cropping, resizing, tweaking brightness and the like, it's just not the greatest interface we've encountered.
Jacks, ports, plugs (2.00)
We dislike the port setup on the TL34HD for a number of reasons. Firstly, it's a proprietary port, which requires expensive cables to replace, and is the only included way of charging your batteries. Secondly, even though the camera is touted as being HD, there's no HDMI output unless you buy an additional docking station (which we've only seen listed on European websites for €39, which is about $50). Finally, the plug is completely exposed, without any sort of protection, which is just asking for keys, mud, sand and anything else to get stuck in there and damage it.
We're not big fans of proprietary ports.
Direct Print Options (6.00)
The TL34HD handles both major forms of direct print options. Firstly, there's PictBridge, which lets you plug your camera directly into a printer and control the number of prints, their size layout and quality. Secondly, there's DPOF (direct print order form) which lets you add digital tags to the pictures on your memory card, so you can hand it directly to a printing service and they can print off what you need.
Battery (6.00)
The battery lasted well on a full charge, considering this is a touch-screen camera, and is rated by Samsung at approximately 100 minutes or 200 photographs. We would have liked an external battery charger, though, as opposed to charging the battery inside the camera. This is especially problematic if you want to charge a spare battery while you're busy shooting.
Memory (4.00)
The TL34HD has 40MB of internal memory, and takes MMC, SD, and SDHC cards. These are the most common form of memory card for point-and-shoot cameras; they're inexpensive, and available just about everywhere.
The battery and memory card share the camera's nethers.
Other features (2.00)
Image Stabilization- Much like the Samsung NV40, the TL34HD offers two types of image stabilization, both optical and digital, the latter of which is only available in a Dual Stabilization mode. Optical image stabilization uses a gyroscope to steady the lens, and according to Samsung, the NV40's digital image stabilization system "uses proprietary algorithms to produce a final image using the extracted color data and shape information from a captured image". In our informal testing, we did not find any benefit to using both types of stabilization.
