Samsung L74 Wide

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http://reviews.cnet.co.uk/digitalcameras/0,39030233,49290788,00.htm

Reviewed 30 May 2007

Reviewed by Will Greenwald

When you think about camera lenses, 'zoom' is probably the first word that comes to mind. Lots of camera manufacturers focus on giving their cameras the longest zoom lenses available, but while 5x, 10x, and 12x lenses are all handy for getting up close to far-away targets, they're not so good for wide shots.

Typically, these high-zoom lenses have wide angles equivalent to 35 or 38mm, which is relatively narrow for taking shots of groups, landscapes or buildings. The 7-megapixel Samsung L74 Wide's lens is designed for framing the big picture and you can buy it for around £160.

Design
The solid-feeling L74 Wide is actually rather slim, measuring less than 25mm thick. Its metal body with black surface seemed to pick up scratches at the slightest tap. The camera itself feels quite durable, but you won't keep it in pristine shape for long.

A 76mm (3-inch) touchscreen LCD takes up the entirety of the camera's back. It serves as the camera's primary control interface, supplemented only by two buttons and the zoom rocker. Every setting, from flash to white balance, must be changed through the touchscreen menus. As with most touchscreen interfaces, navigating with the L74 Wide's screen feels awkward and unresponsive and repeated taps are often necessary to access the right function.

Features
As its name implies, the L74 Wide specialises in taking wide-angle shots. Its 3.6x zoom lens starts at a 28mm-equivalent angle of view, letting you fit more into your shot, which tends to be much more useful in everyday situations. For example, a 28mm-equivalent lens can get more people into a group photo, or frame a tall building without forcing you to step back as far as you would with a 35 or 38mm-equivalent lens.

In an attempt to help keep your shots steady, the L74 Wide includes Samsung's Advanced Shake Reduction -- an electronic image-stabilisation system that boosts ISO sensitivity and speeds up the shutter for high-speed and zoomed-in shots.

For jet-setting photographers, the L74 Wide offers a unique feature -- a useful on-camera guidebook called the World Tour Guide. While it contains information for countries and cities all over the world, it's far from comprehensive. It mostly lists landmarks and places to visit, with a small snapshot and a short text blurb to go with each place.

Unfortunately, the details are pretty sparse; descriptions of landmarks such as the Empire State Building don't even list their addresses, never mind helpful details such as hours and events. You also have to navigate the guide entirely through the touchscreen -- a frustrating feat for full-fingered users. Worse yet, you have to download the various guidebooks from Samsung's World Tour Guide site and install them on the camera yourself.

Only install the guides to the countries you plan to visit, though -- the World Tour Guide can eat up a significant chunk of the L74 Wide's 450MB internal storage and you can't install it on a memory card.

Performance
With a lagging shutter and long shot-to-shot time, the L74 Wide's performance seriously disappoints. The camera takes an arduous 4.4 seconds to start up and capture its first image, and can only fire off a single shot every 2.8 seconds after that.

Shooting speed (in seconds)
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)

Typical shot-to-shot time

Time to first shot

Shutter lag (typical)

Canon Powershot SD750

1.6 

1 

0.5 

Casio Exilim EX-Z75

1.8 

1.6 

0.6 

Nikon Coolpix S50c

2.4 

3.9 

0.9 

Samsung L74 Wide

2.8 

4.4 

0.9 

Typical continuous-shooting speed (in seconds)
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)

Typical continuous-shooting speed

Canon Powershot SD750

1.6 

Samsung L74 Wide

1.4 

Nikon Coolpix S50c

1.4 

Casio Exilim EX-Z75

0.7 

With the onboard flash enabled, that shot-to-shot wait balloons into 4.2 seconds. The shutter lagged a painful 0.9 seconds with our high-contrast subject and an otherwise respectable 1.1 seconds with our low-contrast target. Burst mode shot quickly enough, snapping nine photos in 6.4 seconds for a rate of 1.4 frames per second.

Photos taken on the L74 Wide range from mediocre to terrible, sporting some of the worst noise we've seen in recent months. Noise filled a majority of our shots, appearing heavily at levels as low as ISO 200. The noise appears as a muddled, fuzzy grain at low levels, but at ISO 800 and 1,600 it becomes a maelstrom of blurry static. Besides the massive amount of noise, the L74 Wide's photos also suffered from heavy fringing. A fuzzy pink appeared around almost every high-contrast edge (white flowers against green leaves, grey bricks against blue sky).

Despite the fringing and noise, the camera's photos have one redeeming feature: they aren't very distorted. With both wide-angle and high-zoom lenses, we often see distortion on at least one end of the zoom range. The L74 Wide's lens barely distorted zoomed shots and wide-angle shots suffered from only modest barrel distortion.

Conclusion
Although its wide lens and World Tour Guide are very useful features, the Samsung L74 Wide, available for around £160, simply has too many flaws to ignore. An irritating touchscreen interface, painfully slow performance and noise-filled photos make this a camera we simply can't recommend.

Additional editing by Jon Squire