Samsung Digimax i50

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By Damian Koh,Edvarcl Heng
Feb 08, 2006

It'll be hard to distinguish the Digimax i50 from the Digimax i5 save for a few cosmetic differences to denote its MP3 playback capability. So unless you're one of those music junkies and have a high-capacity Secure Digital card for storing your tracks, you're better off with other digicams out there.

Design
It's unlikely you'll find the i50 in a shirt pocket or around your neck due to its weight. This compact 5-megapixel shooter measures 90 x 60 x 17.8mm and weighs 137g (with battery and memory card). The i50 is bundled with a complete set of accessories including an attractive mesh pouch, wrist strap, extra battery and a pair earphones. We're being picky, but it would have been better if the earphones sported an external control. That way, we won't have to constantly remove the camera from its pouch to increase the volume or to skip to the next track.

Instead of hiding behind a metallic sliding cover (as it does on the i5), the i50's 3x optical zoom lens, flash assist lamp and built-in flash are exposed to the elements. Before you start to worry, the Schneider-Kreuznach glass on the i50 is still protected by a cover which slides down when the camera is activated.

The MP3 playback capability on the i50 is represented clearly by blue letterings on the shooter itself. The W and T zoom buttons allow you to adjust the volume to your desired level; the Mode key now lets you switch to the additional MP3 function; and after all the adjustments, pressing the Safety Flash button will lock the i50 into a Hold position to prevent accidental changes.

Features
The i50's interface is very similar to the i5 with each page of settings sporting a different background color. Included in the feature set on the i50 is the Safety Flash option for indoor shooting, 11 scene modes and advanced functions to adjust exposure compensation, white balance, ISO and RGB settings.

In case you're wondering, yes, those sticker frames are still around on the i50 (with a total of nine to choose from) and composite shooting is also available on this camera.

During MP3 playback, the directional keys play a different role. You press left or right to change tracks and down for Play/pause. Hitting the Menu button will bring you to the menu where you can choose to either play or repeat one song, or all the tracks on your memory card. There's also a shuffle option if you prefer to let the camera decide what's best for your earbuds.

What's slightly more interesting is a photo slideshow option while you're listening to your songs--with much less dramatic effects of course, compared with the professional-looking slideshow transitions on Sony's newer digicams.

From our experience, it wouldn't take a rocket scientist to figure out how to transfer MP3 files to play on the i50. We'd suggest a high-capacity memory card (we used an Imation 1GB SD card in our tests) if you listen to a lot of music and still want to shoot many high-resolution pictures. All your MP3 files should go into a folder titled MP3--which you will have to manually create--and the i50 will recognize these files as songs which you can playback.

Getting to the music mode proved to be an easy task and Samsung did an admirable job of adapting the camera's controls for music playback. It's intuitive, too, with the zoom toggle serving volume control and the quad-directional joypad for playback. However, as an MP3 player, the i50 proved very simplistic.

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