Samsung TL34HD

Noise
If you've ever tried taking photos at a range of ISOs, you know that increased light sensitivity comes at a cost of static that appears across your images. This static, known as noise, hits at every ISO, it just becomes far more noticeable at higher settings. We test how prevalent this occurrence is with the camera by shooting at a range of ISOs, and looking at the amount of noise present in each.

Noise – Manual ISO (10.89)
For the TL34HD, there was no way to manually control noise reduction, though it undoubtedly has it. You can see in the graph below that the noise increases steadily from ISO 80 to 400, then drops at 800 before increasing again to 1600. The reason for this dip is most likely that high ISO noise reduction kick in at ISO 400, thus lowering the overall occurrence of the insidious static.
 

The TL34HD keeps noise levels below at 1% at ISO 200, and only gets to 1.5% noise at ISO 1600. That's an eminently respectable result, putting it among the better point-and-shoot cameras.

 

Auto Noise (4.63)
The second half of our noise testing basically judges how smart and adaptive the camera is. We shoot a brightly lit chart with the camera set to auto ISO, and see what setting it chooses. In some situations, we've had cameras default to as high as ISO 800, which accounts for the occasional abysmal result, as higher ISO translates to higher nois. The Samsung outdid itself, shooting at ISO 200, where it already has a low noise level. These two factors combined give it a high score in the noise section.
 

Low Light (6.13)
Whether it's at a bar or a birthday party, there are times when you're going to be using your camera in less than ideal lighting. A camera flash, while good for some things, is liable to send any candid subjects running in terror, and has a habit of making them look vampiric under the unflattering light of the strobe. To see how the camera handles without a flash in these low light conditions, we run two tests.

The first involves photographing the GretagMacbeth chart at a range of light levels, from 60 lux (standard indoor nighttime illumination) to 5 lux (the brightness of a single candle) and running the resulting images through Imatest to look at color accuracy and noise levels.

 

The TL34HD struggled a little at the higher end of this scale, having relatively low color accuracy at 60 and 30 lux. However, once the light levels were lowered even further, to 15 and 5 lux, the amount of noise was lowered and the color accuracy increased. The TL34HD showed itself to be competent in these low light conditions, if not amazing.
 

The second half of the low light test is based on long exposure performance. We put the lights down to a sultry 30 lux, set the camera on ISO 400, and try and coax it into taking exposures ranging from 1 second to 30 seconds. Unfortunately, with the TL34HD, any setting above five seconds completely over-exposed our color chart, thus rendering our tests incomparable to previous cameras. However, for the one and five second exposures, the noise levels were average but color accuracy was quite low.
 

In the low light tests, the Samsung did surprisingly well at the very low light levels, 15 and 5 lux, but only average for levels above that and in our long exposure test.
 

Samsung TL34HD Low Light Scores

Still Life
To show you the effect shooting at different ISOs can have, we've taken a number of images of Rosie the riveter and her friends as well as our loving couple at every available setting. The lighting is standard fluorescents with a bit of incandescent for good luck, the camera set to Auto. Click on any image below to see it full size. It may take a long time to download, though, as they're large files.

ISO 100
ISO 200
ISO 400
ISO 800
ISO 1600
ISO 3200

Video Performance (4.79)
One of the key selling points of the TL34HD is its video performance: in fact, the HD in the title refers to high definition. Our laboratory testing procedure, though, calls for standard-definition tests of both color accuracy, image noise and resolution. We first film our color chart at 3000 and 30 lux, and the resolution chart at 3000 lux. From these videos we extract a number of frames, and run them through Imatest to look at color accuracy and resolution.
 

 

Low Light - 30 Lux
Alas, the camera didn't handle low light videography quite as well. Noise levels bumped up to around 4%, and the color accuracy was low. Unfortunately, videos taken with the lights turned low might not look quite as good as you would like.

 

Resolution (0.90)

Things start to fall apart for the Samsung video in the resolution section. Like with still photography, we measure resolution as line widths per pixel height (lw/ph). The TL34HD managed a paltry 260 lw/ph horizontally and 267 lw/ph vertically. To put it bluntly, this is a horrible result, and it shows. When you record video, on either hi-def or normal, there's major compression artifacting, blurring and just a generally unclear look.
 

Motion (0.50)

Like resolution, the camera struggled with our basic motion tests. While not quite as scientific as some of our other trials, this involves us recording speeding cars on the streets of Boston. The TL34HD had trouble focusing on moving objects, and they appeared blurred in freeze frames. Alas, even with good color accuracy in bright light, the camera just doesn't take very good videos.