Imagine you’ve bought a car that’s lots of amazing: It’s lightning quick, foxy as anything, solid as you like and eats lesser cars for a light afternoon snack. But in the end, you leave it in the garage, because you have to top it up with fuel every few miles. Sadly, the downfall of this camera is that fuel-guzzler flashy car syndrome: On paper it ticks the boxes, but in real life it just doesn’t hack it

The S1050 comes with all the toys: Face recognition technology, which self-adjusts so your subject’s faces are in focus. It packs a healthy 10 megapixels, has a damn fine 1/2000 sec top-end shutter speed, 45MB built-in memory (up to 4GB using SD cards), and it’s built like a double-reinforced Sherman tank. The LCD screen deserves a special mention; it’s a whopping 3 inches, and Samsung have looked after the details, with a hard-plastic shell protecting the display.

With so many things going in its favour, it’s such a shame that they’ve stumbled over the simplest hurdle. You could solve the battery problem with the optional SNB-2512 battery and charger kit, but let’s face it — if you’re spending £160 on a camera, you don’t want to have to splash another wad of cash to be able to use it to its full capacity. The final straw is that even if you do get a rechargeable battery and charger, you end up with a last-century NiMH battery: most manufacturers (including, interestingly enough, Samsung) now include ‘intelligent’ long-lasting Lithium Ion batteries with current digital cameras.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 9th, 2007 at 12:31 pm and is filed under Digital Camera. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.