Product Reviews

The two lenses on the front of the Samsung VP-D6050i give the camera an unusual look. The second lens is a 3x optical zoom for the camera's built-in digital stills camera. Shots are stored on SD or Memory Stick (MS) memory cards and, with a 5.3-megapixel (2,592x1,944) resolution, it can compete with a dedicated digital camera. With manual aperture and shutter priority, pop-up flash and manual focus, we expected a lot from this camera.

Unfortunately, there are several imperfections. Inside shots in particular suffer from a lot of noise and fine detail is lost in the distance. Daylight shots are a lot better, although some image noise is noticeable on close examination. We also noticed some chromatic abberations appearing, although you have to look quite hard to find them.

Changing the image format to TIF (there's no raw mode) had little impact on quality, so the faults in the camera aren't just a case of JPEG artefacts. Still,

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it produces better-quality shots than the digital camera mode on conventional camcorders.

Video performance is generally good, considering the VP-D6050i uses an 800,000-pixel CCD, which puts it in the budget digital video (DV) camera range. Image quality is fine with no colour reproduction problems. However, fast camera movements tend to cause some artefacts, with horizontal lines appearing across the image. It's not a huge problem and smooth camera movements will eliminate it.

The full night vision mode is good to see on a budget camera. It's rated for zero lux, or complete darkness to you and me. As with Sony cameras that have this feature, it produces slightly green-looking images by way of its night vision lamp. The intensity of this light can be adjusted so that partially lit scenes don't get flooded out.

The 10x optical zoom lens is quick to focus automatically, and it also has a manual mode accessed via a scroll wheel on the front of the case. It's not quite as simple to use as a twist-lens, but it's good to have the feature anyway.

Despite its two lenses, the camera's interface is fairly simple, with only a few short cut buttons providing easy access to the most common features. Other options are accessed through the LCD display and a menu system.

This is by no means a top-of-the-range DV camera, but a relatively low price and decent performance in both digital stills and video modes make it a great buy for those on a tight budget looking for the convenience of a combined device.