Samsung i8 First Impressions Review

Viewfinder
The Samsung i8 sports a 2.7-inch color LCD screen, but no optical viewfinder. 

LCD Screen
The 230,000-pixel LCD screen displays nice colors, but depicts movement as quite jerky, which is most likely due to a slow refresh rate. Pressing the top button of the control dial cycles the screen through three display modes. One displays all control settings, one removes most display items, allowing full view of your subject, and one provides shooting tips at the bottom of the screen. The screen can be viewed up to an angle of approximately 45 degrees on either side before it darkens significantly. The angle is a bit less from top to bottom. The view could be better, especially because the camera doubles as a video player. The shiny screen gets easily marked up by fingerprints, but is easily cleaned by a soft cloth.

Flash
The i8 has a built-in flash located to the side of the lens. This causes the illumination to be slightly off center, giving subjects slight shadows. The flash is pleasing for portraits because it doesn’t blow out foreheads, but it also doesn’t have much range. However, Samsung claims the flash range will be changed for the full production model. The i8 has six Flash modes: Auto, Auto and Red-Eye Reduction, Fill-In Flash, Slow Sync, Flash Off, and Red-Eye Fix.

Zoom Lens
The i8’s optical system consists of an internal 6.3 to 18.9mm (38 to 114mm in 35mm equivalent) f/3.5 to f/4.5 Samsung lens. It has a 3x optical zoom, and 5x digital zoom. An internal lens is much more durable than an extending zoom lens, but the tiny aperture range limits the amount of light let into the camera. The zoom itself is smooth and quiet but quite slow, allowing seven zoom steps between 1x and 3x. In Macro mode, the camera could get as close as two inches to an object before losing focus. This is quite impressive.