I just got this camera today it is easy to use and navagate. The touchscreen works well with fingers as wellas the included stylus (i put it on the hand strap for easy access) The stylus works good when logging into facebook, youtube, photobucket and the many other available places to share your photos. I uploaded a picture to facebook with relative ease.I liked the auto backup too, you can backup your pictures to a Pc without connecting the camera to the Pc (awesome!!)The picture quality is great too!The video mode supports HD 720p i havent tried it yet but its HD! I suggest this camera to anyone looking for an easy to use point and click camera with some kick ass extras like the ability to touch up / edit photos before u send them on their way to FB or wherever you send them!
I LOVE the fact that you can charge the battery without taking it out of the camera (Like the way you charge a cell phone). No need for a separate charger, so one less piece of gear to lug around. The benefit of this also means you can charge it on an as-needed basis (I charged it through the power outlet in the rental car I was driving). This was the key feature that drove my purchase decision, and its strange that it doesn't get mentioned much in the marketing literature since it's a major advantage over the competition.
The touch screen interface is a disappointment though. If you are used to a smart phone type touch screen then this screen will seem slow and clunky. It feels more like a PDA from 2004 than a smart phone from 2011. Also, putting all the controls on the touch screen makes for some usability issues. I would prefer to see physical buttons for commonly used operations like turning the flash on and off. A camera is a dedicated device so should be optimized for common photography use cases.
The wireless connectivity was pretty cool, but again suffered usability issues. Connecting to wireless networks was a pain with the clunky touch screen. This is a long way from an iPhone or Android OS. Also, there doesn't seem to be any control over the name of the album or the subject of the facebook post. The wireless connectivity is is a very cool idea, but it still has some way to go before being truly compelling.
At the end of the day I think my money was well spent. Samsung is on to a good thing and I hope they continue evolving this product line.
Buy Samsung EC-SH100 Wi-Fi Digital Camera with 14 MP, 5x Optical Zoom and Touchscreen (Silver) Now
I just received my SH100 today, so I won't try to do a full in-depth review. However, in the hours that I've played with it I can already tell that there are quite a few 'quirks' that seriously hinder an otherwise great camera.First, the camera comes with a touchscreen interface for most of the functions. Sadly, it also comes with a stylus which, in my experience, isn't optional to use in many situations (such as typing) at least with my large fingers. Even worse there isn't a place to store the stylus within the camera itself. Instead, it clips and hangs awkwardly from the lanyard. While a generally small nuisance (and perhaps a non-issue for those with smaller fingers), it would have been much nicer if the screen was sensitive enough to work via touch or there were discreet navigation buttons.
The biggest issue for me, however, has to be the software running on the camera. The UI isn't very pretty and is awkwardly organized. It feels very hastily thrown together. Again, this is a minor disappointment, but something that should have been easy to fix. Unfortunately, that isn't all. The software is also quite buggy! I had found several issues within the first few minutes (where was the QC?!) which took hours to resolve. For one thing, logging in to Picasa was a real pain as there were issues with the software recognizing both my email address AND password. The login for Picasa should be the same as my Google login. However, my account is associated with several email addresses and only one of them was accepted for some reason (and it wasn't my normal gmail.com account, it was a tertiary address I rarely use). Even worse there's a serious bug in the password handling that prevents it from recognizing a password with any special characters! As best I can tell, only numbers and letters will work as they should. If you enter a password with a special character the password will not be accepted. This was a real problem for me as I did not want to change my password (I use many different Google services across many devices, and changing the login credentials on all of them would be a real headache!) Fortunately, I discovered an undocumented workaround/hack. If you change special characters to URL encoding (so pa$$word becomes pa%24%24word) it will work (even though it really shouldn't!) Unfortunately, this seems to prevent the password from being stored properly (only characters up to the first % are stored!). So far I have only tried logging in to the Picasa service, but I suspect these issues are present in all password fields and may well extend to user names, etc.
To be fair, the camera has some really great features and it takes very nice pictures for the price. In fact, it really could be an AMAZING camera if they ever get the software straightened out. Unfortunately, until new firmware is released, this camera has fallen fairly short of its potential.I bought this camera based on the Engadget recommendation, because the camera records video in H.264 instead of the horribly inefficient motion JPEG, and for the cool WiFi feature. When it arrived I was impressed at how small it is but the menu system seemed to crash a lot or become unresponsive.
It turns out this camera has a firmware update from July 29, 2011. I wasn't able to upgrade the firmware with the included (on the camera's internal storage) software; you should try to do it that way, but instead, I copied the contents of the firmware .zip to the root of the Micro SD card. After upgrading the firmware the camera's menu system is much more usable.
Pros: Compact size, H.264 movie mode, never have to plug it into the computer to get the photos off due to the WiFi, large, bright touchscreen
Cons: Flash takes 5-10 seconds to charge after taking a photo, works best in outdoor light, doesn't use a standard USB cableMy pretty daughter was looking for a little camera to take on her DC trip and obviously my big SLR was out of question. So we went to a store to do some shopping. I left her alone for a few mins and asked her to find something she likes. When I got back she said she chose this camera. Well, I told her she'd better check out Canons or Nikons because they are great cameras and who knows about Samsung. But I really got puzzled because I just couldn't convince her they are better. And after some thinking we ended up buying this Samsung camera.
This camera is really special for 2 reasons.
First is touchscreen. These days touch is the de-facto standard interface for mobile devices, so once you've tried a touchscreen camera it feels natural and going through menues with buttons really feels awkward. At one moment the Canon and Nikon menus became annoying. Yes, there is a stylus mostly for virtual keyboard but you can really get by with just fingers most of the times. So touchscreen does make big difference.
Second is connectivity. The camera comes with Wi-Fi and it has built-in software to post pictures on facebook and some other popular services. And you can upload pictures wirelessly to your computer. No cables. This is a big deal.
So is this camera a sure buy? Well, it's a bit more compicated. This camera is really trying to be a compromise between a "real" camera and a smart phone. In a "real" cameras land this camera is good but not the best. There are competitors out there with slightly better specs (like 1080HD instead of 720HD etc) but arguably you'll unlikely to notice a significant difference any "pro" camera needs at least a bigger lense and heavier weight to capture a better image to begin with.
Basically if you really like touchscreen and wireless you should seriously think if you'd rather buy a good smart phone. Yes, I can't think of any smartphone with 14MP, 5x Zoom, a 720p HD and a "real" flash, but does it justify carrying two devices? My daughter was saying that this is a big trip and she wants to capture the lifetime moments and she ended up with a smartphone and this camera (so hard to say no to an adorable daughter ...) but when we looked at the pictures she brought back, they are not really much different from her smartphone ones. So yes, with some skills you can do miracles with the camera but for most ordinary people and real life shots the results will be about the same. I mean you're unlikely to print a huge poster and a typical computer screen has
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