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Samsung's ASR (advanced shake reduction) recognizes when the shutter speed will be too low to avoid shake, and automatically ups the ISO value in order to get a faster shutter speed -- a feature that, while useful in some situations, often results in unexpectedly noisy images, and significantly increased processing time. Rather than being a menu item that can be turned on or off in any shooting mode, ASR is its own shooting mode, set by the mode button on top of the camera, meaning you can't use it in combination with scene modes or program/auto/manual modes.
One of the NV11's strongest new features was Samsung's Face Recognition technology, which works surprisingly well. While we've used other cameras with this feature, we found the Samsung's to be hard to fool -- it recognized and focused on faces no matter where they were in the frame, and with multiple faces available to choose from it did a good job picking the closest one. The focus square on the LCD jumps to the face that's being used as the focus point, giving nice visual confirmation of what it chose to focus on. The only downside to this nice feature is that it's not available in all shooting modes, forcing you to choose a limited set of "portrait" modes if you want face recognition. Turning this feature on and off also highlights the difficulties of the Smart Touch interface. While there is a specific button for it on the back of the camera (among 12 others of the same size and shape), Smart Touch often decided to scroll or bring up a menu rather than just turn face detection on or off. It became a ritual to double or triple check to see if it was on or not because of the quirky buttons.
The large choice of available scene modes (12 in all) is welcome, and all of the ones we tried gave the results you'd expect. The Landscape scene mode provides punched up colors and large depth of field; Backlight turns on fill flash to balance the foreground subjects with a bright background; and Beach & Snow mode avoids underexposure when shooting on a bright landscape. The camera delivered very good color saturation and color balance in pretty much every situation we threw at it, and results in bright sunlight weren't overly harsh or contrasty.
Movies recorded with the NV11 look very good, thanks to the 640x480 resolution and 30 fps speed (VGA). You can keep recording movies as long as your memory card has space on it, and pressing one of the Smart Touch interface buttons pauses movie recording, with another touch starting it up again, all recorded in one single file -- a nice feature that not many competitors can boast about. You can zoom in and out while recording movies, but the camera turns the microphone off while zooming (to avoid motor noise in the movie), resulting in odd sound dropouts if you zoom. Our advice: if the audio is important, say at your daughter's flute recital, don't zoom! Most of the same digital effects available for still pictures can be used for movies -- graphic frames, for example. And once the movie's recorded, edit out unwanted parts with the trim function, or grab a single movie frame and save it off as a still image. To get more movie time, you can reduce the resolution to 320x240, drop down to 15 fps, or both.
The NV11's playback mode stands out, with a variety of options for editing and showing your photos. You can adjust brightness, contrast, and saturation; you can resize, crop, and rotate photos (rotation being a necessity for vertical shots, since the camera has no orientation sensor); and you can apply the same effects (combining multiple images, using graphic frames and overlays, etc.) you could while shooting. There's also a redeye removal tool, though it didn't do a very good job in the few images we tried it with. With the mode dial set to Photo Gallery, playback allows you to organize your images into categories (such as family, friends, events, etc.), and set up fairly elaborate slide shows that include transition wipes and background music. Movies can also be edited and have effects added as mentioned above, and be included in slide shows. One downside to playback mode is that the one-line "help" explanations for functions don't show up as they do in recording mode, requiring you to memorize icons that are as often obscure as they are helpful -- or resort to the manual for explanations.
The camera is a pleasure to handle, with the hefty metal body feeling strong and substantial in your hands, and a well-placed rubber strip on the front of the protruding hand-grip providing a firm anchor point. The solid all-metal body makes it a bit heavier than some others in its class, and while it fits in a shirt pocket, it'll certainly make the pocket sag. Controls are solid and easy to operate, aside from the comments above about the Smart Touch interface. The power button is nicely recessed, helping to avoid accidentally turning the camera on or off. The built-in flash is adequate for its intended task, and works quite well as a daytime fill-flash though it seems a bit blue compared to standard daylight color balance.
We certainly got a lot of comments when out shooting with this camera. Its stylish looks drew attention and had lots of people asking about the camera. The image results, however, aren't nearly as cutting-edge as the styling. While images were good, and the camera performed about as well as anything else in this class, there wasn't really anything extraordinary about them. The same goes for the optics -- good in most cases, but with some softness at the long end that can detract from results. Then there's Smart Touch, an interface that engenders love and hate at the same time. What you get with this camera is a mostly typical 10.1-megapixel compact wrapped in a gorgeous body... and something your friends will certainly notice and ask about!
COMPETITIVE SET
• Canon PowerShot SD900
• Casio Exilim EX-Z1080
• Nikon Coolpix P5000
• Olympus Stylus 1000
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