Samsung ST50

If you're in it for good looks, this one, the ST50 is a real looker! As I shall point out further down, the price you pay for the good looks and sexy body is in the form of just about average performance.

This slick little camera has a petite body - 105 x 61 x 37 mm - and weighs just 219 grams. For the style conscious, the camera's available in Silver, Black and Red, all with a handsome and neat brush metal finish. The camera's built with a smooth profile and features no jutting buttons/edges, ensuring that its small size and perfectly slender build lend it excellent portability. You can slide it into the pockets of your tightest jeans with no trouble at all - a feat that most compact cameras don't boast of.

The well labeled buttons are all perfectly positioned for easy access; the most significant feature where button placement is concerned is the 'smart' mode button that's placed on the top that allows you to enter a powerful auto-detect scene mode, and a video/still toggle button for those that wish to have easy access between both modes.

The camera features a 2.7-inch LCD screen that features your standard 230,000 pixels. Nothing out of the ordinary here; the screen performed adequately in sunlit conditions too. While being amongst the smallest ultra-compacts around, the ST50 manages to impress with good looks and an exterior that's easy for even the novice to use.

Features and Performance

If you're looking for a camera that boasts of insane specifications and brilliant performance, you might not find it here. The camera features just 3x zoom (which is less, but considering it's an ultra-slim camera, it's forgivable) and has wide-angle capability of just 35mm, which is very average. The small size of the camera doesn't even allow the lens mechanical image stabilization. Instead, what you're left with is digital image stabilization, which is better than nothing, but not close to that offered in better cameras.

The CCD sensor can go up to 12.2 megapixels, which would be impressive if detail levels on this baby were high. As it stands, the camera's detail levels were a little iffy with small details lost in places. Autowhite balance on the other hand was spot on, and color reproduction was great, but a little on the vivid size.