Samsung Digimax A5

Since my wife has taken to digital photography, I needed to replace my all too frequently borrowed compact camera. I had intended spending around £150, but quickly realised that if I stretched this slightly to £160 I could choose from a large range of 4MP or 5MP cameras with some useful features. The latter would be a bonus - I have a digital SLR which I use for photographs published in magazines, but I like having a small happy snapper for holidays, and the odd picture which crops of in everyday life that just begs to be taken. I ended up choosing the Samsung Digimax A5, a 5MP camera with 3 x optical zoom (38mm to 114mm equivalent) lens, which I got for £144.98 including VAT, with a two year warranty.

The A5 is certainly fine for point and shoot - very easy to use without much attention to the manual. Most of the functions are fairly intuitive, and it did not take long to find my way around them. Some websites are a bit vague on what this cameras "extra" functions are, but in a nutshell, it has manual exposure: aperture priority, shutter priority, manual shutter and manual aperture (ISO value alters to suite). ISO is also selectable between 100 and 400, and white balance can be selected by light source or set manually with a white card. It can average zone or spot meter, and exposure and focus can be locked with the usual half shutter depression. There are a range of presets for landscape, portrait, sunset, night sky etc. which give certain aperture / shutter / focus combinations, some of which are quite useful. It has a macro setting down to 4CM (1.6"), and macro will allow manual focus. It does not have manual focus in the 80CM (32") to infinity range, although as I wrote earlier, it will allow focus lock. One function button can be programmed by the user as a shortcut, but I have not decided what I will use that for yet.

The camera seems to be well built, with a nice solid feel. The buttons are not too fussy, but with any small compact, it isn't difficult to press some by accident. With my large fingers, I seem to unintentionally select flash occasionally; not the end of the world since it is just as easily turned off. The optical viewfinder has no dioptre adjustment, but I can see the whole frame wearing my glasses, so not a huge problem Closer than 1.5 metres (5ft) I'd use the LCD anyway, to avoid parallax errors, the optical viewfinder being 25mm (1") north west of the lens. (The 1.8" LCD screen is pretty accurate for framing.) Once focus is set, taking a shot is as near instant as I can judge, and time between shots I'd say less than a second. It will do multiple shots, but only two in the highest quality. There is no focus assist lamp, and this leads me to my only gripe so far. Focussing in low contrast lowish light conditions is poor. This can be overcome by using a higher contrast subject (e.g. the room's light source) at the same distance your intended subject is, and holding focus, but this isn't ideal.

Battery life is what you would expect from a couple of AAs - as with any digital camera, it is worth investing in some high capacity rechargeable batteries. Carry a couple of Alkalines as spares, ordinary batteries just won't hack it.

The image quality is fairly impressive. Optically, it is certainly better than my Japanese 35mm compact with its 35mm - 70mm zoom. I don't have the time to set up pseudo, much less proper scientific tests, but here are my observations. I took a picture at maximum wide angle of a 200ft tall tower crane with its chain dangling down the extreme side of the frame. Likewise a flat roof on the upper and lower extremes of the frame. There was no obvious barrel distortion viewed on a 17" monitor at 27" x 20,25". I took a picture of a brick wall at maximum focal length, the shot being about 30 bricks wide. Viewing the bricks at 200% of the same picture size, I could not see any pincushion distortion. Now, I am not saying that these effects are not there, just that I don't think they are going to be too obvious in your average picture. Optical image quality at maximum aperture was better than I expected. Softening in the very corners of pictures taken at both minimum and maximum focal length was very slight indeed. The colours recorded in daylight looked very faithful too. There was no sign of noise in the dark areas of the pictures I took, even looking very closely at the 27" picture. A small degree of chromatic aberration (purple fringe) could be seen on over exposed areas (e.g. thin branches against brighter areas of sky) on shots taken at maximum aperture, looking very closely at a 200% enlargement of the 27" image. At any sensible viewing distance this isn't noticeable. (I assume you would not be printing such a large print from a small format camera anyway.) Automatic white balance is excellent outdoors, and even pretty good in fluorescent light, which is remarkable. The flash setting produces good colours, very slightly over exposed at close to minimum range, but still quite acceptable.

Please accept these observations for what they are: the subjective views of a slightly informed user, not a professional review. I hope they help you.