Samsung goes into overdrive with i7, L74 Wide and NV11

Damian Koh | Jan 30, 2007

Samsung's top echelons must have been working their engineers really hard. Camera dust from CES has barely settled and the Korean chaebol is already announcing three more new shooters to flood the market.

When was the last time you heard of a camera doubling as a tour guide? Never? Well, two of Samsung's cameras do exactly that. The i7 and the L74 Wide feature a built-in Tour Guide function that provides access to travel information covering 4,500 regions in 30 countries. If that's not enough, you can pump more tidbits into the 450MB internal memory which, frankly, is an awesome amount of space.

Both cameras are fitted with a large 3.0-inch touchscreen LCD and come with face recognition AF/AE functions. Here's the interesting bit: You can rotate the i7's screen. At neutral position, the camera doubles as a music player. Turn the panel 90 degrees and the shooter morphs into a portable media player; push it further and you'll have a camera that takes pictures and videos.

Paling in comparison with the i7 and the L74 Wide is the NV11 which features a 10-megapixel image sensor, 5x optical zoom, face recognition and a maximum ISO 1,600. No word on when these cameras will be available in Asia, but friends in the US can get the NV11 in May for about US$400. The L74 Wide ships this Spring with a suggested retail price of US$350.

On a totally separate note, either our eyes are playing tricks on us or our minds are still on vacation mode that the NV5 slipped past us unnoticed. Or perhaps we missed the announcement altogether. Other than the lack of an optical image stabilizer, the NV5 could almost be a replica of the NV7, with a 7.2-megapixel sensor, 7x optical zoom and 2.5-inch LCD.

Filed under: Digital Cameras
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