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We'll start with the good news. Color accuracy is excellent, and the Samsung L74 Wide controls noise well up to ISO 400. However, resolution isn't the greatest for its megapixel class (Very High/1550 at ISO 80, dropping to Acceptable/1200 at ISO 1600), and there is visible barrel distortion at the 28mm wide angle setting (.54%). At 60mm pincushion distortion is imperceptible (.09%), but it creeps up to slight pincushion distortion at 101mm (.14%)
More than that, though, the camera has a very limited dynamic range, which means that it has a really tough time holding details in shadows and highlights simultaneously. Get ready for bald skies, or muddy shadows, and sometimes even both in the same image. And it can drive you crazy with it, too. One shot will lock onto the sky, giving good blues and puffy clouds and harshly blocked up shadows, but the next will lock onto the shaded areas, giving good exposures here, but totally blowing out the highlights.
That's not the only problem, however. There's a "Self Shot" scene mode, but it doesn't activate Face Detection, and doesn't use flash -- not even for fill, so it might not yield the best results unless the sun is positioned perfectly. Why "Self-Shot" wouldn't incorporate the Face Detection technology makes little sense to us!
The camera has a good burst rate -- 2.0fps for a long, indeterminate amount of time -- but it only makes an electronic "snap" for the first frame. This makes it easy to forget that the camera is still firing away!
Playback, as we've mentioned, has some fun extras, such as doodling, stickers, a canned-music slideshow, composites, cartoon bubbles, silly frames, and a strange "add noise" function. The latter really degrades the image, giving it a cheap cell-phone camera feel, which is nice if that's what you're going for.
On the video side, the L74 Wide will record at 640 x 480 px (VGA) at 30 frames per second, or 800 x 592 (SVGA) at 20 frames per second. Samsung also touts the ability to zoom while recording video. Unfortunately, sound capture is halted during zooming, so the audio just goes totally blank. We'd rather hear a bit of motor noise than nothing at all if a camera is going to allow zoom while recording!
THE BOTTOM LINE
Samsung's got a pretty good thing going in the L74 Wide. They've made a great-looking camera with a cool 3-inch touchscreen interface, a unique Tour Guide feature, and some fun extras that are sure to be a hit with the younger crowd. But more experienced photographers who demand first-rate image quality -- even in a compact pocket camera -- will likely be disappointed with the limited dynamic range and metering issues, the serious wide angle distortion, and a few other cut corners that make the good-looking Samsung L74 Wide more a toy for the tweens than a serious vacation camera.
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