Samsung Digimax V800

Manual Control Options
The V800 offers full manual control, including shutter priority, aperture priority and a fully manual mode. The latter is a little confusing: you have to use the ASM button to switch between the aperture and shutter, and then use the jog dial to make the adjustment. It’s a little clumsy, but usable.

Focus
Auto Focus
The auto focus was very responsive, quickly hunting down the correct focus point. However, you can’t change the focus point. The V800 can only focus on subjects in the center of the screen. This is a limitation, but the manual focus is flexible, so focusing on off-center subjects is relatively easy to do.

Manual Focus
Manual focus is available and surprisingly easy to use: just press the MF button and use the jog dial to focus. It takes a few seconds to go from close into infinity, and it’s easy with the sharp screen to see when the images are in focus. It’s certainly no focus ring, but it’s a lot better than using arrows on the four-way controller to manipulate a sliding bar in a menu, which is the preferred method on a lot of point-and-shoots or compacts.

Exposure
The aforementioned shutter priority, aperture priority and fully manual modes are on offer. Several scene modes affect exposure in predetermined ways as well, and there’s an exposure compensation setting that allows for adjustment two stops up and down in 1/3-stop increments. All told, the range of exposure options on this camera is quite good.

Metering
Two metering modes are available: Multi (which evaluates the entire image, with weighting on the center of the image) and spot. It’s surprising that a compact of this price doesn’t offer a center-weighted option as well, which makes an appearance on cameras as early as the $200 mark, although, to be fair, the Multi mode is somewhere between being an overall and center weighted mode.

White Balance
Various white balance settings are offered: auto, daylight, cloudy, fluorescent H, fluorescent l, tungsten and custom. The last allows you to enter a color temperature manually, which is something of a rarity in cameras of this type.

ISO
The ISO range is adequate: there are settings for 50, 100, 200 and 400, which has been the standard range for compacts. There’s also an auto setting that will probably be the most commonly used one.

Shutter Speed
In most modes, the shutter speed range is from 1 to 1/2000 of a second. In manual mode, this is stretched to 15 seconds, and night and fireworks mode stretch this to 8 and 4 seconds respectively. However, noise may be a problem in the longer exposures as there’s no noise reduction function.

Aperture
The Schneider-Kreuznach lens has an aperture range of f/2.8 to f/5.1. This is a limited range, even for a compact, but will still enable users to pull in plenty of light, while still closing down to provide decent depth of field.