Samsung TL350

Design & Appearance

This is a serious, professional-looking design, with none of the added bells and whistles or festive color schemes often festooned on lower-end compact cameras.

Size & Handling

The TL350 measures 3.91 x 2.32 x 0.85 inches, making it slim enough to fit into a pants pocket (unless you favor tight jeans, of course) and perfectly portable in a jacket. We don't have an official weight, but it feels solid and substantial in your hand without being unnecessarily heavy.

The TL350 felt good in the hand, with a nice combination of textured grip and sculpted thumb rest on the right providing stability.

We found the TL350 very comfortable to handle, owing in part to the nicely crafted, deeply textured grip on the right side. There's also a sculpted thumb rest on the camera back, which both provides a solid handhold and prevents your thumb from wandering onto live camera controls.

More problematic are the camera controls themselves. The four-way controller is quite small and, at least in the sample we experimented with, not particularly responsive. This is particularly annoying when there are four potentially useful shortcuts to shooting settings mapped to the four directions: display, ISO, macro mode and flash.

It's surrounded by a scrolling wheel that makes zipping through menu lists quite speedy, but that raised dial accounts for part of the four-way manipulation problem. Finally, there's a dedicated vertically-oriented scroll wheel on the far right of the camera back, next to the thumb rest. This wasn't working properly on the pre-production model we tested, so we have to reserve judgment on its ultimate effectiveness. From what we could tell, it offers direct access to drive mode settings in both still and video shooting modes. We assume it will also serve as part of a one-two control system when using manual exposure control, but that wasn't working yet either. We were surprised that this wheel apparently serves no purpose when maneuvering through the menu system. Logic says that, if you have a horizontal menu laid out before you, turning the dial that moves horizontally would move the cursor. Doesn't seem to be the case.

Menu

The two-part menu system, with a quick menu that appears after pressing the FN key and a more traditional menu accessed via the well labeled MENU button, is clearly arranged and works efficiently. The quick menu provides a scrolling set of options along the left side, with a fly-out list of options arrayed horizontally. This is where we expected the side scrolling wheel to help out, but spinning the circular control is a reasonable, if less instinctive, substitute.

The Quick Menu system arrays settings categories on the left, with available choices displayed horizontally.

The main menu system spells out your options in black and white (OK, blue and white), and navigation is reasonably simple.

The main menu is readable and well organized, though navigation could be simpler.

Ease of Use

The number of options and level of control available with the TL350 inevitably lead to a certain level of complexity, but there is an idiot-proof Smart Auto mode for those who prefer total point-and-shoot automation, and the menu system is clearly arranged if a bit tedious to navigate.