Samsung i7First Impressions Review

by Richard Baguley
Published on March 21, 2007

Navigation
Intro	Physical Tour
Components	Design / Layout
Modes	Control Options
Image Parameters	Connectivity / Extras
Overall Impressions	Conclusion

 

The i7 offers minimal manual control; there is no way to directly set the shutter speed or aperture settings. Users can, however, manually set white balance.   

 

The auto focus on the i7 was pretty responsive. In our limited testing at the PMA show, it generally found the right focus point within about half a second, even when going from a close up to a distant object. We weren’t able to test the low-light capabilities of the focus mechanism, though. For the normal auto focus mode, Samsung claims a focus range of 31 inches to infinity. The i7 does include a nice super macro mode, though, which takes the minimum focus distance down to less than an inch. This is useful if there is an entomologist in the family who wants to record their bug collection.

 

No manual focus is present on the i7; it’s all totally automatic.

 

The ISO range of the i7 is pretty wide, going from 80 to 1600, with stops at 100, 200, 400 and 800 on the way. That’s a wide range for a point-and-shoot, but it remains to be seen how much noise becomes a problem at the upper settings.  

The i7 also has a good range of white balance settings, with a full auto mode, an evaluative mode and 5 presets: Daylight, Cloudy, Fluorescent_H, Fluorescent_L, Tungsten.

Although there are no true manual settings, you can set exposure compensation of up to 2 stops up or down, with 1/3 of a stop settings on the way. There is no histogram display, though, so the only way to judge how much exposure compensation you may need is to bank on the accuracy of live preview.

The three usual metering modes are present: Spot, center weighted, and an overall evaluative mode that uses an unspecified number of spots on the image to gauge exposure. One interesting touch is the Wise Shot mode: this takes two shots sequentially (with just one press of the shutter); one using the advanced shake reduction, and the other using the flash. That way you can pick whichever one looks best. It's a helpful mode for users who are less familiar shooting in low light; it proved to be effective on Fuji's FinePix models. 

Although you can’t set it manually, the i7 has a shutter speed range of 1 to 1/2000 of a second. Using the night scene mode increases the longest shutter speed to 16 seconds. That’s a pretty wide range for a point and shoot camera.

 

Samsung claims an aperture range of f3.5 (at the wide setting) to f4.5 (at the telephoto setting), but didn’t specify a maximum aperture. While the total range is still unknown, the limited max aperture will force users to get into the higher ISO settings more frequently and test the effectiveness of the camera's noise reduction algorithms.