Product Reviews

Samsung's S1050 is a camera with some big numbers. The 10-megapixel sensor produces colossal images, its 5x optical zoom is getting on for twice that of most compact cameras and the 3in LCD screen is frankly enormous. The only figure that's reasonably humble is the price. At £153 including VAT, this is the most affordable 10-megapixel camera we have seen by quite a margin.

The menu system is divided into photographic controls, special effects and general settings, each accessed by a different button. The black, engraved icons are tricky to see, though, so you'll need to memorise which button does what. The mode dial includes aperture-priority, shutter-priority and manual exposure modes. We're always delighted to see these options, but they could be better implemented. You need to half-press the shutter button to preview the exposure brightness and depth-of-field effects, but doing so takes the camera out of the mode for adjusting aperture and shutter speed. The 3in screen and its 230,000-pixel resolution help with manual focus, but not enough for precise fine-tuning.

Four seconds to switch on

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and take a picture is too slow for our liking, and the three-second gap between shots is fairly pedestrian, too. This is often a downside of high-resolution cameras, but dropping the resolution didn't improve matters. The huge screen zaps battery life, only managing 260 shots in our test.

A 10-megapixel sensor can push the limitations of a camera's optics, but we were pleased to see that the S1050's images were seriously sharp right into the corners of photos. Subtle skin textures were captured with impressive detail and the default centre-weighted metering option coped well with bright and dark backgrounds. However, even in very bright conditions, noise was visible in darker areas of photos; this was not enough to spoil them, but enough to take the shine off sharp detail. The problem worsened in gloomier lighting, and indoor shots at ISO 400 were distinctly grubby. The camera sensibly limits itself to ISO 200 on automatic settings, but this means it isn't a great camera for low-light photography.

Video is recorded in MPEG4 format at a generous 840x480 pixels, giving a wide aspect ratio and more detail than with most digital cameras' video modes. However, there was quite a lot of noise in videos, which put a strain on the MPEG4 format (noise is inherently complex, which makes it hard to discard information to reduce file sizes). The result was that video looked quite messy, particularly in low light and fast-moving scenes.

This is almost an excellent-value camera but, as is often the case with very high-resolution sensors, noise is its downfall. We love its 5x zoom and 3in screen, but we'd prefer to live without them and settle for the Canon A630's smaller but cleaner images.