Samsung NV7 OPS

Print | Close this window

http://reviews.cnet.co.uk/digitalcameras/0,39030233,49291246,00.htm

Reviewed 3 July 2007

Reviewed by Lori Grunin

Samsung's NV7 OPS simply confounds us: for a company to clearly have spent a great deal of time working on a novel but quite usable new interface, but implement it in a sluggish camera that produces noisy, overprocessed photos just seems, well, wrong.

Granted, it's rather inexpensive given its specs, which include a 7-megapixel CCD with sensor-shift mechanical image stabilisation, a broad set of semi-manual controls and an f/2.8-4.0, 38mm-270mm, 7x zoom lens.

Design
Visually, the NV7 OPS stands out in a crowd. It juxtaposes an ultracompact-slim body with a bulbous shiny black lens that adds about 45mm to the camera's profile while retracted and another 20mm when extended. The camera, with its all-metal body, feels like a little tank.

It provides a traditional dial for selecting your shooting mode: the NV7's includes automatic, program, ASM (aperture priority/shutter priority/manual), ASR (automatic shake reduction, a high ISO setting mode), Effects, Scene program, movie capture and movie playback.

But the NV7's novelty lies in its setting navigation scheme. Thirteen so-called Smart Buttons -- seven horizontal and six vertical -- line the sides of the 64mm (2.5-inch) LCD, putting any menu option in the crosshairs of a button matrix. This technique, in addition to simply looking cool, allows you to quickly select any shooting setting with no more than two button presses.

As a group, the Smart Buttons function as a slider sensor; you slide your finger up or down the row as you would operate a slider on a touchscreen. This is less effective, as the buttons don't seem sensitive enough. Furthermore, though it's useful for newbies to see the shutter speeds on a scale labelled from Slower to Faster, it would be faster to pick them via the options matrix rather than using the slider. In fact, it can be quite frustrating to use, especially for manual focusing.

The LCD is a bigger problem for manual focus, though, because its relatively low-resolution -- 230,000 pixels is typical for its class, however -- and despite a Bright setting, it tends to wash out in sunlight. Furthermore, you really need to view it straight-on; it has a fairly narrow viewing angle.

Features
Amateurs would be happy with the NV7 OPS' feature set. Though misnamed -- the Optical Picture Stabiliser in fact uses a CCD-shift mechanism -- the image stabilisation seems to work relatively well.

In addition to the manual- and priority-exposure modes, you can tweak performance and exposure with Multi, Spot and Centre metering, exposure bracketing, high- and standard-speed continuous shooting, shutter speeds between 15 and 1/1500 sec and apertures between 2.8 and 7.3, three selectable sharpness levels, and manual and white balance presets plus selectable colour temperatures between 3,300K and 10,000K.

A handful of scene modes -- Night, Portrait, Children, Landscape, Text, Close-up, Sunset, Dawn, Backlight, Fireworks, and Beach and Snow -- complete the well-rounded feature set.

Performance
The NV7 OPS' performance matches its image quality, delivering acceptable but not great speed for its class. Based on our test results, it wakes up and shoots in a longish 3.1 seconds, with a respectable shutter lag of 0.5 and 1.0 second in bright and dim light, respectively.

The 2 seconds it takes between consecutive single images puts it slightly behind the competition, though the 2.3 seconds it takes with flash enabled puts it ahead. Unfortunately, its continuous shooting is fixed at about 8 frames and 0.8fps, regardless of image size.

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

Typical shot-to-shot time

Time to first shot

Shutter lag (dim)

Shutter lag (typical)

Canon PowerShot A710 IS

1.8

1.6

1.2

0.4

Casio Exilim EX-V7

1.6

1.5

1.2

0.5

Samsung NV7 OPS

2

3.1

1

0.5

Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ3

1.3

2.3

1.3

0.6

 
Image quality
On one hand, the NV7 maxes out at ISO 1,000, which is pretty low from a spec comparison standpoint. However, the NV7's photos have so much noise -- unless scaled down, anything above ISO 200 looks more Impressionist than Realist -- the availability of any higher settings becomes a moot issue.

In addition, the NV7 has some of the poorest white balance we've seen in a while. When set manually, photos render fine, but the automatic setting yields extremely pink results under incandescent, fluorescent and outdoor light, and the tungsten preset still succumbs to a yellow cast under tungsten lights.

You can record 30fps (frames per second) VGA-resolution movies with the NV7, which it encodes as AVI files using the Xvid codec (provided on CD). The codec is pretty efficient -- 49 seconds of video took 15.64MB, or 327KBps -- but the video doesn't look particularly good. And though the zoom works during movie capture, the camera intentionally -- and irritatingly -- drops audio while you're zooming.

Conclusion
The Samsung NV7 OPS shows a promising interface, but is held back by sluggish performance and so-so photos. Though it's hard to find the combination of manual features and longish zoom range in its price range, you should probably check out some alternatives such as the Pansonic Lumix DMC-TZ3.

Additional editing by Nick Hide