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.

Performance
We didn't expect a lot considering the lackluster performance on the i5. Powering up the i50 took 2 seconds with an additional second for time-to-first shot. Shutting the unit down took approximately 1.2 seconds.

You can shoot thereafter every 3.5 seconds with flash and every 2 seconds without. We disabled picture review on the camera for more accurate results.

The i50 allows you to shoot continuously until your finger tires or when your memory card runs out of capacity at 0.8fps. We managed to snap a total of 48 pictures in a minute on our Imation 1GB SD card. In our tests, the 2.5-inch LCD blacked out during continuous shooting, disabling all forms of preview. It didn't help that there was no optical viewfinder on the camera.

While it took 2 seconds for the i50 to reach its maximum 3x optical zoom from rest, the buzzing noise generated during the action itself was, at best, barely tolerable.

Image Quality
Image quality from the i50 was average. Due to the non-extending nature of the lens, our index finger tended to creep into some of our shots. Shooting in macro allowed us to get as close as 2cm to our subject. The background was appropriately blurred, creating a depth-of-field in our pictures.

Most of our photos were a bit soft and required post-processing on a photo-editing software. There's no form of optical image stabilization on the i50 so most of our night shots had to be discarded due to noise (as a result of higher ISO settings) and blurriness.

There're no equalizer controls, no way of viewing the song files in the SD card and, worst of all, you can't even fast forward a song track. What you do get, however, is Play Mode control and a basic track display. On audio, the i50 had decent-sounding lows, but it's not as solid as we would have liked. Diana Krall's throaty vocals sounded a tad hollow, while treble, though average, was decent enough.