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Steve's Digicams Samsung TL34HD Digital Trends Samsung TL34HD |
Manual Control Options
The TL34HD has an odd hodgepodge of manual controls, giving you a lot of control in some situations, but very little in others. On the positive, you have a Manual mode where you can set aperture and shutter speed, custom white balancing is available, and you at least have some control over focus modes and metering. However, at the same time it's missing some controls we would have liked to have seen, like the level of noise reduction. Also, the aperture is only every able to be set at two levels, maximum and minimum.
Focus
Auto Focus (8.75)
There are three auto focus options available.. You can focus on the dead center of your image, use multi auto focus, or else tap the screen on the region you want to be the center of attention. This is quite common with touch-screen cameras, and lets you precisely focus on just the area you want, anywhere within the camera's frame. Face detection mode can handle up ten faces, and has a couple of variants to help allay common problems. Smile shot works to snap the picture whenever the person grins, and blink detection will take three photos rapidly if it realizes that your subjec's eyes are closed in the shot. If you're feeling a touch narcissistic (and frankly, you are awesome) there's also a self-portrait mode, where the camera will beep at you when your face is in frame and in focus.
ISO (8.50)
The ISO range on the TL34HD is a respectable ISO 80 to ISO 1600, with ISO 3200 available at reduced 3-megapixel resolution.
White Balance (8.50)
As with ISO, there's a good range of white balance presets. As always, we're happy to see a custom white balance choice (allowing the user to manually set the white balance by shooting a neutral white or gray card), and the auto white balance showed itself to be highly accurate in our tests . There are also presets for daylight, cloudy, fluorescent H, fluorescent L and tungsten. Shade and flash would have been nice additions, but their absence isn't a deal breaker.
Exposure (5.00)
The TL34HD has exposure compensation in Program and Manual modes, and can be set at ±2 EV in 1/3 steps. It has some degree of auto exposure bracketing; you can't control it, and it shoots at the slightly odd ±0.5 steps in either direction.
Metering (7.00)
For metering, you can set the TL34HD to spot, multi, or center-weighted according to your whims.
Shutter Speed (7.00)
The shutter speed can be set from 16 to 1/2000 of a second, an impressive spread, especially at the longer end of the scale. One annoyance we encountered: setting the shutter speed involves repeatedly sweeping your finger across the screen, rather than just jabbing at the appropriate spot. It felt slow, and was awkward to manage when trying to change a setting quickly.
Aperture (5.50)
Aperture controls are distinctly lacking on the TL34HD, a problem we also noticed on the NV40, also from Samsung. While it's nice of them to let you at least alter the f-stop, you can only set it at either the largest or smallest aperture, and nowhere in-between, which is ultimately frustrating if you're trying to fine-tune a photograph.
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Image Parameters