Samsung NV4

Part camera, part multimedia system, Doug Harman discovers the NV4 provides gizmos galore besides those for talking pictures

The 8.2MP NV4, a “premium multimedia camera” as Samsung bill it, won’t find you parting with too much cash, costing around £150, so it looks good value. Just what do you get for your hard-earned cash if you buy one, though?

The lens sits in the top right-hand corner on the face of the camera (watch out for straying fingers) offering a broad expanse of the all-metal bodywork to admire, the only other kit on the front are the tiny, rather underpowered flash unit and its adjacent AF sensor/self-timer lamp.

Clean, slim lines extend to the top plate, where a nice Mode dial spins to select the relevant mode of choice, more on these in a moment, and you get a large, oddly placed shutter release that sits too far over, and can be confused with the Mode dial at first. An attractively illuminated blue LED on/off button is recessed, but can be difficult to use for those with larger fingers.

Over the other side of the top plate, a circular feature hides the camera’s speaker system, through which you get SRS Surround Sound output – it is this that hints at the multimedia functionality, which we’ll check out in a moment or two.

In the meantime, on the back plate, the camera’s 2.5-inch colour screen is very nice to use and can even adjust brightness automatically for the ambient lighting level, making it rather good to use, a relief as there’s no optical viewfinder to back it up.

Rather small buttons to the right of the screen provide access to the usual array of features such as Playback and Menus, the latter control sitting inside a four-way jog control for Screen Toggle, Macro Shooting, Flash and Self-timer functions.

The rather small zoom button at the top is as fiddly to use as it looks, given its size and the narrow gripping surface presented by the small camera body. However, the “E” button provides fast ingress to the camera’s photo style selector, where sharpness, contrast and the like can be altered as well as the overall look of a shot; say black-and-white, or “Classic” as Samsung prefer to call it! You also get “Soft”, “Calm”, and the like too.

The NV4’s embedded multimedia player plays movies (you can convert videos on a PC to use on the camera if you wish using the simple-to-use Samsung software that’s supplied), MP3 music files or allows reading of text.

You can to listen to music while snapping images too, which is fun, or while reading text or reviewing shots you’ve taken. Sound quality is okay via the supplied earphones, but their proprietary connection means, disappointingly, you cannot connect earphones with a “standard” 3.5mm jack.

The Mode dial’s DIS position or Digital Image Stabilisation mode bumps up the sensitivity to an impressive ISO 3200 in an effort to keep things sharp in low light, say, but image noise becomes a problem over ISO 400, and a real issue above ISO 800. At ISO 1600 and 3200 noise is very bad, almost unusable in fact, and so it’d be nice to see an optical image stabilisation solution on a future NV4 update.

A neat Movie Shooting mode allows the creation of high-resolution MPEG-4 SVGA (that’s 800 x 592 pixels) movies with sound, but only at 20fps, so it’s a bit jerky in play back. However, at VGA and lower settings, you get both 30fps and 15fps modes to play with, so a 1GB SD/SDHC storage card provides up to 2.5 hours of video or over 426 stills (in the Still Shooting top quality, top resolution setting).

The camera’s Auto Bracketing control is very welcome, and a great feature to have built into a camera at this level, the camera automatically shooting a brighter and a darker shot, plus a metered image, to help give a range of options; ideal if you’re not sure which way to go exposure-wise.

Timing for start-up to first shot is around three seconds, with the flash turned on it’s about five seconds, and there’s a noticeable shutter lag, too, so watch out for vacant frames if you’re shooting fast action, particularly since there’s no Sport/Action mode, not even in the subject programs.

The metering is very good, though the Auto White Balance setting has problems in mixed lighting, switch to a dedicated mode (Sunlight for sunlight, Tungsten for tungsten etc) and things are much better.

The lens’ 38-114mm focal range is average at this price point, but provides sharp results thanks to an otherwise-effective AF system. However, the multi AF can get it completely wrong occasionally, and I found switching to the single, central AF zone helps, both in terms of sharpness and speed of focus.

The Samsung NV4 provides an average photographic performance overall, but having a camera that provides other facets, such as MP3 playback, as well as photo capability is rather enticing; I like the NV4 for that reason, plus its low ISO image quality.

The flaws, such as they are, are no worse than similarly specified eight-megapixel models, so, while detracting from the overall performance, they mean it is no worse than others in the field. Now, I can at last remove my sunglasses.

Final Verdict The NV4 is a bit of a mishmash, providing an average performance in a stylish multimedia package, where problems around excessive image noise are a concern OVERALL

Doug Harman has over 19 year's experience as a journalist, writer, photographer, and digital camera and technology tester. He has written extensively for a multitude of digital photography magazines and websites, and he's also the author of two books.