Samsung Digimax V800

Model Design / Appearance
The V800 is housed in an attractively styled polished aluminum case, with rounded edges and smooth curves. It’s available in light and dark silver colors. Upon first glance, it looks like many of the cameras in Olympus’ D-series with its smooth, low-slung, and minimalist design.

Size / Portability
At 4.17 x 2.2 x 1.2 inches, the V800 is at the smaller end of the compact camera spectrum. It’s a little thick to comfortably fit in a shirt or pants pocket, but it is small enough to fit into a handbag or coat pocket. The rounded edges help it to smoothly move in and out of such places.

Handling Ability
The V800 handles well, with the rubber bar on the front acting as a finger hold that means it’s unlikely to slip out of your hands. The shutter and zoom controls fall under the index finger and thumb, respectively, and the jog dial by the shutter button is comfortable to use. Samsung offers no edgy design innovations on this camera, and in doing so, they’ve stuck with what works.

Control Button / Dial Positioning / Size
Although the numerous control buttons on the back of the camera are within easy reach of the thumb of the right hand, you really need two hands to use them: the right hand to hit the controls and the left to brace the camera and stop it falling out of your grasp as you do so. Although having plenty of buttons does make life easier by providing easy access to the controls, I’m not sure of the wisdom of putting controls like manual focus on dedicated buttons. Most users aren’t going to use it that often, and the real estate could have been better used for another more commonly used control such as switching scene modes or disabling the screen backlight to save battery power.

Menu
The onscreen menus are complex, but reasonably well structured. There are a lot of options in there, but the text labeling them is easy to read thanks to the high resolution screen. The menus are broken down into 11 sections: metering, shooting, sharpness, effect, special effect, OSD info, Save Myset, setup, Mycam image size and image quality. This layout does mean that it can often take a lot of button pressing to get to the section of the menu you want, and some settings are a little buried. However, not all of the options are available in all modes: in the full auto mode, you can only access the size, quality, setup and OSD info menu items: the rest are locked out.

The onscreen display is also a little overwhelming, with up to 24 icons and settings displayed at once. Fortunately, most of them are only present when required (such as the aperture and shutter settings in manual mode), so the screen does not get overly cluttered.

Ease of Use
Although it is bristling with options and features, the V800 is a simple camera to use. The controls are logically laid out and the buttons by the LCD screen provide quick access to several commonly used settings; you can change the ISO setting with only 3 button presses, for instance, through the +/- button. That’s a lot quicker than many cameras that bury it deep within a menu.