Samsung TL500

Handling (7.50)

Shooting in the continuous mode in the highest JPEG quality and resolution, the TL500 managed to capture an average of 1.4 frames per second. That’s a little on the low side, but it is adequate for capturing many things, and it is good that it is unlimited: using a 4GB SDHC card, we found the camera had no problem at all capturing continuously at this speed until the card filled up.

Buttons & Dials (6.50)

The TL500 has a lot of buttons and dials on the camera body, and these can be a little overwhelming for novice users. They are well laid out, though, with a consistent approach that makes it easy to navigate the camera.

On the top of the camera body are the shutter and zoom controls, plus the two mode dials. The drive mode dial (on the left in the photo below) controls the drive mode of the camera, setting the self timer and burst mode, as well as providing an option to enable the bracketing features of the camera. The second mode dial on the top of the camera sets the shooting mode, with options for Program, Aperture, Shutter, Manual, Dual IS, Scene, and Movie.

Both of these dials can be turned using the thumb for one-handed use, but they are more comfortable to use with the camera held in two hands.

On the back of the body are the other controls, with dedicated buttons for exposure lock, movie record, menu and metering above the directional pad. This directional pad is surrounded by a scroll wheel which can be used to scroll through images or adjust the aperture setting in A or M mode. The 4 directional buttons are used to navigate menus and to control the display, the flash, the AF and the ISO. An OK button in the center is used to select a menu option or finalize the choice of a list item.

Below this are two more dedicated buttons for playback and accessing the function menu.

Menus (6.00)

The TL500 offers two different types of menu: the function menu and the main menu. The function menu is accessed by pressing the Fn button, and contains options that directly relate to the shooting process, such as image size, ISO, white balance, etc. The idea is that it makes these easily accessible, and it generally works well, although the list does get rather long when shooting in one of the manual or priority modes.

The other menu is the main menu that is accessed by pressing the menu button, which provides access to all of the camera features. This is divided into 5 sections: camera, movie, sound, display and settings. Again, the system works well, but there are a lot of options on each of the tabs, and finding the ones that you want is often confusing; the bracketing setting is on the bottom page of the camera options, for instance.

Manual & Learning (6.00)

The TL500 comes with a basic, but adequate, printed quick start manual. On the included CD is a more in depth user manual. Both of these are pretty good, explaining the features of this somewhat complex camera in good detail.