February 15th, 2008Review of Samsung NV15
Just like its predecessor, the NV15 is slim enough (97 x 60 x 19 mm) to fit into any pocket with ease. It’s a bit on the heavier side because of its all-metal body, but that’s not actually worth your concern. It may be slim, but Samsung’s worked a little handgrip into the design, which goes a long way in offering a good and comfortable hold.
The best-looking thing about the design is a touch-sensitive button array system that makes navigation a breeze. In case you didn’t know, the buttons are located to the right at the bottom of the screen, and their function changes according to the indicators on the screen. It may feel a bit tricky at first, but after a minute you’ll appreciate its ease over a usual camera direction-finding system.
The camera is built for the relaxed point-and-shoot audience. It does feature a half-baked manual mode, but the limited options and lack of manual focus make it a useless feature. Not that it’s necessarily a bad thing – the NV15 has a well-defined audience and the features cater perfectly to it. The NV15 has a standard set of shooting modes, but as far as I could tell, most of them are quite adaptive in case you forget to control the scene mode after clicking the desired shot. It’s not sensible, but it still shows how little the camera restricts a casual shooter.
Besides the regular feature set, the NV15 also has an Effect mode. Here you have access to fun stuff like funny frames, image compositing, and the option to shoot multiple pictures and turn them into an animated GIF file from the camera itself. As juvenile as it may sound, this feature was actually the most appreciated feature when I showed the camera to any of my friends. Even the post-processing options in the camera are impressive. You have the common options to crop and resize images; you can change the color tone to black and white, sepia, negative, red, green, etc. along with an option to remove red eyes. As good as these may be, I wish there was an option to accurate the exposure of the images in the suppression options. That would have made the wrap up complete.
In our performance tests, the Samsung NV15 scored pretty well overall. It took just a little over a succeeding to start up and the same time to power off. Shot-to-shot time gap without flash was around two seconds. These timings make the camera pretty fast when compared to others in its category. Colors seemed a bit soaked, but that’s predictable from a camera aimed at normal consumers. Expect your pictures to look ‘happy’.
The sharpness levels were great even with the kind of detail captured in landscape shots. Though shooting at sympathy levels higher than ISO 400 would be inadvisable, the camera does perform very well in its Night countryside scene mode. As you can see below, it has done a pretty decent job of making the most of available light without showing much digital grain.
Overall the NV15 makes a great family/vacation camera at Rs 17,990 (street price with bill and warranty). It’s small, easy to use, packed with fun features, and gives great results. So long as you don’t expect any manual functionality, you’ll be more than happy. Highly optional!
