Samsung NV3 review

If looks are everything, you may as well read no further, because whatever our verdict is, you'll be buying a Samsung NV3 by the end of the week.

It looks great and it feels even better. The black case has a lovely matt finish, it feels strong and well built, and it slips easily into your pocket.

The specs are good, too. The aperture may be a fairly uninspiring f3.5-4.5, and the lens has a fairly ordinary range of 38-114mm, but ISO sensitivity runs from 80-1000, which should be enough to handle most everyday lighting situations. The shutter speed spans a very impressive 15-1/2000 second, and the chip is rated at 7.1 megapixels. The closest macro focus is stated as 1cm, although we had to stop at 5cm or it would fail to get a fix. At that point, though, the results were excellent, but if you like your macro to demonstrate a particularly shallow depth of field, you may want to look elsewhere, as at least two thirds of the frame was pin sharp.

It'll shoot larger movies than any other camera here and ships with a rechargeable Lithium-ion battery, which helps keep the whole package compact.

However, we weren't overly impressed by its outdoor performance on an overcast day. An accurate result would have had fairly muted colours, but the NV3 had boosted them enormously to compensate for the low light and we ended up with gingerbread brickwork, rather than dirty red. This could perhaps be attributed to the fact that the ISO sensitivity was clocked down to 240 for a longer exposure, which we found surprising when this camera's maximum is 1000. Shooting at low ISO settings is fine for reducing noise, but sometimes you do need to compromise.

Indoor portraits under fluorescent lighting were far too dark when taken without the flash, and too warm with it, leaving us to conclude that like the Nikon Coolpix S9, the Samsung NV3 is best suited to those who know how to manually adjust the settings. It's a shame, then, that they're perhaps this camera's least likely customers.