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Sleek, sexy, stylish... not words you often hear when talking about compact digital cameras. But hear them you will if you take Samsung's NV11 out to take pictures. Samsung's NV line certainly looks good, and the NV11 looks just as stylish as its siblings in the line. How do the images that come out of it compare to its flashy exterior?
LET'S TAKE A LOOK
The NV11 keeps the 10.1-megapixel output of its NV10 predecessor, with a new lens with extended zoom range and a fast f/2.8 maximum aperture. The $279 (street) compact features a 5X Schneider-Kreuznach zoom lens (38-190mm 35mm equivalent), ISO speeds from 80 to 1600, shutter speeds from 15 to 1/2000th sec., a 2.7-inch, 230,000-dot LCD display, and a stainless steel black-finish exterior. There are the usual Auto, Program, and scene modes for exposure control, as well as manual control with a few restrictions. Movie recording is quite capable at 30fps in VGA-size (640 x 480 px), saved in MPEG-4 format.
The camera has the latest version of Samsung's "Smart Touch" interface, which has the user navigate menu and control functions by sliding a finger across multiple buttons that surround the LCD display on the rear. The Smart Touch interface is certainly unique, and we found it to be wonderfully easy for some operations, while absolutely annoying for others. Intuitive it's not... when we first picked up the camera we had to refer to the manual to do some of the most basic operations, something that doesn't happen often. With a bit of practice we got the hang of it, but there were still many times when the interface had us lost, confused, and frustrated. We let several non-photographers handle the camera and take some pictures, and their overall opinion of the interface closely matched ours -- odd. One person even managed to get so stuck in the menus that we had to once again pull out the manual to get back to taking pictures! Add to the confusion the fact that button sensitivity is a bit twitchy, making it easy to select the wrong option as you scroll your fingers around, and we have to give Smart Touch low marks for ease of use. Call it an interesting idea that probably needs more work to be truly useful.
Autofocus is fast and accurate in most cases, taking less than 0.5 seconds to focus except in very low light (when the focus-assist lamp on the front of the camera lights up to help out the autofocus system). Shutter lag -- how long it takes between your finger pressing the shutter button and the picture being recorded -- was very low, not noticeable in almost all cases. However, that doesn't exactly make the NV11 a speed demon. Once the picture is taken, it can take anywhere from 1 to 5 seconds before it's ready to take another, depending on the mode you're shooting in. Turning on Continuous shooting mode allows you to shoot at a sped-up rate of 0.6 frames per second. Two other continuous shooting options are available: high-speed mode, which takes a burst of three frames at 1.6 frames per second (the camera delays processing the images until the burst is done, making the wait after the 3-frame burst quite long), and "Motion Capture Continous Mode," which takes up to 20 lower-resolution (1024x768) images in a row at about 7 frames per second. In both of these modes the LCD is turned off while the images are being taken -- and with no optical viewfinder, there's no way to accurately follow a moving object without the LCD!
Images for the most part came out sharp and contrasty, a testament to the quality of the Schneider-Kreuznach lens. At the long end of the zoom range, however, the corners of images got quite soft, enough to easily notice even in small prints (see the 100%-sized crops in the gallery for examples). The maximum aperture of f/2.8 does give more ability to do selective depth-of-field imaging than many slower-aperture compacts, and out-of-focus backgrounds had a pleasing soft look to them. The maximum aperture is variable, giving f/2.8 at the wide end of the zoom and f/4.4 at the long end, a very usable range that's more versatile than many of its competitors at the long end. Zooming was smooth and easy via the rear up-down zoom control, which falls right under a fingertip in the usual "hold it out in front of you like a zombie" position for shooting with compact digitals. The lack of an optical viewfinder, while common these days, is regrettable, but the bright, high-definition LCD was quite visible outdoors on a bright day even though its shiny surface does produce some reflections.
Image quality is good, but doesn't really distinguish itself from other compacts in the 10-megapixel range. Noise is visible even at ISO 100, though it's not objectionable -- but by ISO 800 it is somewhat annoying. Noise reduction kicks in at ISO 200 and above, though it's somewhat heavy-handed and results in a loss of detail. Even with noise reduction, high-ISO shots are quite noisy. The results aren't that different from other compacts in this class, and you'd have to move up to DSLR territory to get this many pixels with really low noise (due to the larger sensors DLSRs use, which help control noise better).
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