Movies

You can also shoot movies on the NV10. You have your choice of 640x480 or 320x240 at either 15 or 30 FPS; you can also shoot with or without audio. The NV10 shoots .AVI files with MPEG-4 encoding, so I found that I could shoot more video than I could on a camera that doesn't use MPEG-4, such as my Canon SD550.

Playback

There's a photo album feature on the NV10, which unfortunately isn't described very well in the manual. You can also play a slide show with different intervals. The playback mode includes a couple of interesting features: you can rotate, crop and resize pictures in the camera, add colour effects and create motion GIF files from pictures you've taken.

In The Field

I decided to field test the NV10 against another 10 MP camera, my Rebel XTi. While admittedly this may not be a fair comparison because of the disparity in price, I think you'll find the results interesting. For my tests, I shot pictures of a distant bridge at the highest resolution supported by each camera. I selected this subject because I felt the steel infrastructure and surrounding power lines would give me an indication of the crispness of the lenses.

I zoomed each camera so that the bridge occupied approximately the same percentage of the frame, and shot each camera at both ISO 100 and ISO 800. The four pictures below tell the story; each image was cropped to the same dimensions at 100%. As expected, the Rebel XTi produced images that were superior to the NV10 at both ISO 100 and ISO 800. At ISO 100 the NV10 showed somewhat more noise than the Rebel, but the biggest difference was at ISO 800. While the Rebel exhibited a lot of noise at ISO 800, the NV10 produced a picture at the same speed that I felt was unusable.

Rebel XTi image shot at ISO 100

Samsung NV10 shot at ISO 100

Rebel XTi image shot at ISO 800

Samsung NV10 shot at ISO 800

Conclusion

There's a lot to recommend the Samsung NV10. For one, it's fairly good value. The innovative user interface is fairly intuitive, but the user manual leaves a lot to be desired. A novice photographer will experience a steeper learning curve due to skimpy documentation, and more experienced photographers may want a camera that has shutter and aperture priority modes as well as a manual focus, features all missing in the NV10. Of course pricing on the web varies greatly, but for approximately the same amount of money, I'd prefer the HP Photosmart R967.

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