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Samsung S1050

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Product Summary

Good

6

out of 10

The good: Manual exposure controls; face-detection features are useful.

The bad: Slow to shoot; photos are filled with noise at all but the lowest sensitivity settings; face detection is unreliable in low light.

The bottom line: The 10-megapixel Samsung S1050 has lots of neat features, but its photos come up lacking.

Read full review of the Samsung S1050 »

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CNET Asia Review

By Phil Ryan, CNET.com
Oct 1, 2007

With cameras, you usually get what you pay for. If you're willing to drop more cash, you'll generally get more features, faster shooting, and better pictures. So naturally, when we saw the Samsung S1050--the beefed-up, higher-resolution version of the S850--we thought it would prove to be a superior camera. We were wrong.

Design

The S1050 shares almost the same design as its little brother. Its lens juts significantly out from its solid, chunky body, though not nearly as much as the absurdly endowed Samsung NV5 or NV7 OPS. Its small buttons sit nearly flush against its back, but the buttons aren't spaced apart enough to be easily manipulated by large fingers.

For more details on the S1050's design and image quality, click on the image.

A dial on top of the camera offers access to all of its various shooting modes. The dial feels a bit loose, though, and we often accidentally bumped the camera out of the mode we were using while framing vertical shots.

Features

Just like the S850, the S1050 offers several features for more experienced photographers, with program, aperture, shutter, manual (PASM) exposure controls that grant a great deal of flexibility. The S1050 offers the same 38mm-to-190mm equivalent, 5x zoom range, offering a slightly boosted telephoto reach at the cost of its wide-angle abilities.

Samsung's Advanced Shake Reduction electronic image stabilization system can boost the ISO sensitivity and quicken shutter speed for zoomed-in and high-speed shots. While helpful in some cases, electronic image stabilization can only go so far, and simply can't replace a flash or tripod or match the efficacy of optical or mechanical stabilization.

Besides the obvious increase in resolution from eight to 10 megapixels, the S1050 features several improvements over the S850. Its 3-inch LCD eclipses the S850's 2.5-inch LCD and proves invaluable, considering the camera lacks a viewfinder. It also includes face-tracking auto-focus and auto-exposure, which sense when faces are in-frame automatically and adjusts settings accordingly.

Face-tracking AF/AE systems can help a great deal in family photos, for example, where odd angles and positions can leave faces unrecognized by both autofocus and metering systems, which tend to focus near the center of the frame, locking on to the nearest subject they detect. The S1050's face detection works well enough in most cases, but low light can confound the system, causing it to slow down or sometimes not even detect a face at all.

Performance and Image Quality »