Labs

A table of all the full digital images taken with the cameras

As the reigning A-Listed value digital camera, the Digimax V4 was always going to be hard-pushed to retain its status after this competitive Labs. But there are plenty of good reasons why it made it onto the A List in the first place.

For a start, it has a 4-megapixel CCD and a Schneider Kreuznach 3x optical zoom lens. It's compact too, measuring just 106 x 55 x 38mm (W x H x D), solidly built - in spite of the plastic casing - and comes with a carry case.

While Samsung isn't the biggest name in digital cameras, the firm certainly seems to be heading in the right direction, catering for both point-and-shoot and advanced amateurs with the Digimax V4. A dial on the rear selects from eight shooting modes, which include easy, program and the manual mode. The latter is blessed with not only aperture- and shutter-priority modes, but also fully manual control. Oddly, there's no manual white balance, but there's +/-2EV exposure compensation,

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spot metering and manual focus. Many will also appreciate the MySET shooting mode, where you can save your preferred settings.

The 1.5in LCD is rather small, but it's sharp and fast enough for framing and the five-way navigation pad makes the V4 intuitive to use. While no rechargeable batteries are included, Samsung bundles a 32MB SD card for 12 full-resolution images, and it's worth noting that the V4 is the only camera on test capable of storing files in uncompressed TIFF format - although each one would be 11MB in size.

Image quality, as we originally found (see issue 103, p75), wasn't incredible. The auto white balance left a slight green cast in our indoor shot without flash and a blue cast when using flash. However, resolution was excellent and noise minimal. Outdoors, we noticed that the slow auto focus meant moving subjects were difficult to capture and, even on a tripod, our shot of the BT Tower wasn't as well focused as we'd hoped.

In our general testing, though, we found images were always in focus. Metering using the multi setting produced superb results in most situations and the V4 coped well indoors and with harsh backlighting. However, flash coverage was less than we'd hoped for and the Super Macro mode wasn't particularly inspiring. What's more, the sound quality in movie clips was poor and you can't use the zoom.

Sadly for Samsung, Canon's A70 steals a march on the V4, offering a similar array of controls and delivering significantly better image quality for less money.

A table of all the full digital images taken with the cameras