| Design | | We can’t praise the designer enough for giving us this beautiful digital camera. In fact we can’t remember the last time we got this excited over a camera. The steely black matt finished Samsung camera feels really sturdy in your hands - and there’s not a millimetre of plastic in site. It’s only 17.5mm thin and weighs next to nothing in your hand. At the front of the digital camera is the 3x zoom lens with a metallic blue ring around it, a slender flash and an auto-focus lamp. The power button, shutter button and mode dial are located at the top of the camera, bookended by the speakers – oh yes the NV3 also comes with MP3 facilities. These might all just be functional buttons but even these have been designed to fit in with the retro feel of the camera. At the back of the NV3 you’ll find the 2.5 inch LCD, a five function menu button, play mode button (which also doubles up as an immediate printing knob), the delete button and an E-W button. Finally at the bottom of the camera is the DC connection terminal which also works as a USB port, a tripod hole and the battery chamber. When you slide the button with a smooth action the chamber opens to reveal the battery holder and memory card slot. And have we mentioned how nice it all looks. | | Setup/Installation | | You need to put the battery into the carcass of the digital camera, plug in your 24 pin cable to charge up and you're then ready to go. While there's an SD slot the camera's built-in memory can hold around ten high resolution images without a card. | | Features | | This camera has got more features than you can poke a stick with so we’re going to give you the ones we think you’ll be most interested in. To start with it’s a 7.2 megapixel camera but it has options to drop down in resolution to 320 to increase storage space. The 2.5 inch TFT LCD is really clear and produces crisp images even in the sun (although the screen collects greasy finger marks which makes viewing difficult). Samsung have provided a 3x optical zoom which can be pushed to 5x and as well as taking stills you can also record video and sound as well as sound memos. In flash mode you can get auto flash, red eye reduction, slow synchro and no flash. There’s a self timer with two second and 10 second delay. The camera comes with Advanced Shake Reduction (ASR) to reduce any shake and ISO 1000 sensitivity, 12 scene modes, lots of different colour options including sepia and negative and some fun frames for your pictures. A portable multimedia player you can watch videos and listen to music through the two speakers on the top of the camera or by using headphones. Charging the camera is done through a 24 pin USB cable and an adaptor or using a cradle. | | Performance | This is just a lovely camera and there’s very little to complain about. The large screen is really bright and produces a fantastic image when taking pictures. It suffers a bit in direct sunlight but that’s more because the screen is a magnet for greasy finger marks as we mentioned above. From powering on the digital camera to the time you can start taking pictures is a short, sweet, two seconds. The zoom works really well, smoothly zooming towards and away from your subject and the ASR function is one of the best we’ve seen - even while manically shaking the camera as if attached to a Jackhammer the picture came out pin sharp. While there are lots of different functions on the camera they are all fairly self explanatory and a quick play gives you an understanding of what they do. Picture quality is very good and even in low light the small flash works well and produces a decent image. The speakers at the top aren’t stereo quality but they do a job and equally the built-in microphone is of an average standard. There’s lots of options to shoot images either in high resolution or low depending on how much memory you have available and these all worked well. And the different editing functions are brilliant – from changing colour to putting silly frames around your pictures to editing your slide show, it’s all good fun. | | What's In The Box? | | Samsung NV3 digital camera, 24 pin USB, adaptor, headphones, pouch and rechargeable battery. | | Overall Opinion | | This is a great piece of kit and for just under £200 is a bargain. It looks beautiful, feels good in your hand and most important of all works really well. There might be other cameras like the new Nikon S7c that have Wi-Fi or the other NV range, the Samsung NV10 that is a 10 megapixel camera, but in my book this is one of the best cameras around. |
By Babita Wakelin | 
Nice Curved Deisgn.
Tough Steel Casing.
2.5 Inch LCD Screen
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