Samsung S850

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A 38mm-to-190mm-equivalent lens gives the S850 a 5x zoom factor, a slight boost over most snapshot cameras' 3x zooms. Unfortunately, that 38mm starting point doesn't cut it for wide-angle shots. We had trouble trying to capture large rooms, buildings, and landscapes with this camera.



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While a 5x zoom can be handy for zooming in on subjects, we would have rather had a 28mm wide-angle and sacrificed some of the reach on the telephoto end. The S850 lacks a viewfinder, forcing you to use the 2.5-inch LCD screen for framing all of your shots.

While the S850 doesn't have optical or mechanical image stabilization, it does include Samsung's Advanced Shake Reduction, an ISO-boosting mode that hastens the shutter speed for better motion shots. Typically, electronic image stabilization like Samsung's ASR doesn't work much better than simply cranking up the ISO sensitivity and choosing a faster shutter speed yourself (as is possible in the S850's shutter-priority and manual modes).

However, Samsung buried a unique feature called Wise Shot deep in the camera's ASR mode menu. Wise Shot takes two photos--one with ASR and one with flash--and shows you the results. A zoomed-in portion of the two photos lets you actively compare them before you choose which one you want to keep. Unfortunately, it's less useful than it sounds; the flashed pictures almost always look better than the ASR pictures, and since Wise Shot always takes a flash picture, you can't use it when you can't use your flash, anyway.

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