Samsung Digimax L74 Wide 7.2MP Digital Camera with 4x Wide Angle Advance Shake Reduction Optical Zoom (Black)

Having owned several Olympus digital cameras and also used Nikon, Sony & Canon cameras, using this Samsung was an awful experience. It has so many odd features you have to wonder if anyone on their design team ever thought to try out their competition's cameras. Here are the problems I have with this camera.

1. Wrist Strap. For starters the wrist strap holder is a little metal bar that sticks out from the camera into your right hand when using the camera. Every other camera I've owned has it recessed so you don't feel it. At least they should have made it easy to remove so that it doesn't stick into your hand.

2. Batteries. Figuring out how to get the battery in was annoying. I've never had to look at the directions to put a battery in any of the hundreds of battery-operated devices we own. The description said this camera uses AA batteries - it does not. And I could not find anywhere to buy a spare battery. I gave this camera a try only because I thought it would run on AAs and I need to have spares with me because I use my camera to photograh my work in client homes.

3. Touch screen. At first I this was a neat idea. In reality,you have to use a STYLUS PEN to operate it!!! I tried using my finger nails but it did operate properly. When I'm taking pictures the last thing I want to do is worry about finding the stylus pen and hold on it. There isn't even a place in the camera to stick the pen like Palm pilots & Treos have.

4. Transfering Photos to PC. It took about a half hour before we finally got to actually take pictures with. I've never had to look at an instruction book for a camera to get to the point of taking the first picture. Once we finally did get some taken getting to the PC was a pain in the neck. My husband is a computer engineer and he had trouble! Turns out you can't move the pix directly to your computer with a USB cable from the camera's memory like you can with every other camera out there. You can't even do it from the disk. You have to install their software and use their software to make the transfer!! They plaster the camera instructions with warnings that you will lose your photos if you don't use their software. This is ridiculous. You should be able to easily & quickly transfer the photos to ANY PC anywhere with that disk. Even worse, you have to transfer the photos from camera memory to the disk, then you can move it to your computer.

5. Picture Quality. As dumb as all these design errors are, I might have lived with it and not returned the camera if the picture quality were at least as good as my 200$ Olympus. The photos all had a kind of dark and grainy or fuzzy quality to them that I'm just not used to. Kind of like how printed photos taken with ISO 400 or 800 film look. I use photos of my work on my website (see www.neatandsimple.com) and in e-books. The pictures dont' have to be perfect, but they need to at least look good enough to see the work clearly. That's means I need a camera that takes good indoor shots. The wide angle lens feature is awesome, but there are a lot more choices out there as of October 1, 2007. Olympus Olympus Stylus FE-290 7MP Digital Camera with 4x Wide Angle Optical Zoom (Black)just came out with theirs at about the same price so I'm going to try that one.

I wish more attention would be given to the still relatively few digicams that have true wide-angle lenses. This is a much better effort from Samsung on a wide-angle zoom digicam. I previously had the A55W, which had severe limitations and useability issues. I also have the 6-megapixel Panasonic FX01, an excellent wide-angle digicam, which does have more noticeable image noise than this Samsung but still outshines it in some areas.
The Samsung has a very nice build feel and is much faster than the A55W overall. The A55W had a terrible long preflash delay for all flash shots that could not be turned off. The L74 Wide is much speeder in this regard, though I suspect face detection slows the autofocus time a bit, and if you turn on red-eye reduction while shooting, it adds processing time after the photo is taken (as does the ASR shake-reduction feature, since the antishake is done in post-processing in camera). The movie mode allows for very long shoot time, and does allow zooming while recording, but the sound is muted during the actual zooming of the lens, so this will introduce brief passages of complete silence into the video any time you zoom.
The touch screen works reasonably well and is probably no more fiddly than some multi-button setups.
I wish there were an external charger for the battery so it wouldn't have to charge in camera, which would make carrying an extra battery more convenient.
Picture quality overall (at maximum size and jpg quality) is very good, still looking like a small-sensor digicam as opposed to a DSLR or larger-sensor camera, but noise is well controlled in most Auto ISO situations. Flash exposures are also well exposed and don't suffer from overexposure with close subjects.
The World Tour Guide function is quite a gimmick but fun to play with, though I have found a quirk where it only works if you remove the SD card from the camera. It seems the camera will only recognize one "disk" at a time, so if an SD card is in the camera, the World Tour Guide program will start, but the buttons for countries are inactive. If I remove the SD card, the camera will use the internal memory for photos and the World Tour Guide will then work. Samsung did not respond to my customer-service e-mail. I assume a firmware upgrade/fix would resolve this. Any hints from anyone who has used the camera?

I use this camera for Paragliding and shoot pics back at customers who go tandem with me. So the remote is a key accessory for me. however, it is not available yet. if anyone has an idea of how to obtain one of these remotes please let me know, the camera is really quite challenging without the remote. it would be very nice if you could "set" remote and not go back to the default every time its powered off.
The wide angle is great, as is the bottomless video function.
please let me know about the remote, thanks... Drew