With a price way under $200, and ignoring many features which can be found in more expensive cameras Samsung rises again. As an example of full automate shooting cameras, which leave the white balance and ISO settings out of your hands, i couldn’t think of better than Olympus FE-210 and HP Photosmart M537. If however you are planning to spend as little money as you can on a budget camera, you would expect to find an extremely device with few settings. Well Samsung Digimax L700 with 7 megapixels comes with an unexpected good welcomed surprise, and offers us a vast selection of options and controls, at a very low price.

Even though isn’t much of a fashion camera, such as Sony Cyber-shot DSC-T100, with a compact all aluminum body, in silver or black versions, with a smooth design, which can easily slip in to the most pockets, the L700 is really attractive. Its 2.5 inch LCD screen, a little small if you ask me, but it offers us brightness and clearness, enough to shoot anywhere, except for direct exposure to sunlight. It also has a reasonable zoom of 3x, at it’s 35mm-to-105mm-equivalent lens.

Samsung breaks the ice with its offer of plenty of options when it comes to shooting, meaning sensitivity peaks at ISO 1,600, which allows nice flexibility in low-light and faster shooting; white balance includes standard, aka auto setting, for cloudy or sunny weather, fluorescent and even manual, which surprises me in a pleasant way, because i rarely have the chance to see a manual options in a low budget camera
Another innovative feature that surprised me, and I had no idea that i could even hoped to something like this at a such low price, it was its various white balance modes. As you have at the most cameras, options for black-and-white or sepia, the L700 comes with a vast and I think complete set of full customizable colors modes, all under your control, from red, blue and green to purple and more complicated colors for a processor to realize.
Its funky menu is a bit tricky, meaning that the most of the camera’s shooting modes are activated by „+/-” buttons (symbol which is usually used to show only exposure compensation), also the common mode button is represented by an “M”, which normally means manual shooting mode, and toggles only from photo shooting to movie mode. You also find an “E” marked button, from “effects” which applies a series of colors and it highlights overlays the picture, and helps to tint and frame it. That’s why I personally think of this as a con, even though you got no problem with the menu, after you get used to it. Although it can confuse someone who is taking you a picture, and who’s not used to it.
In the tests at which the camera was forced trough, it did acceptably for a budget camera, while it took a time of 2.1 seconds from power on to first JPEG, and 1.8 seconds until the next shoot, with the flash turned on it took a annoying time of 2.6 seconds. Its shutter lag in bright light is of 0.6 seconds and on low light it sadly doubles. The continuous-shooting options takes an average time of 0.9 frame per second, while capturing 7 megapixel JPEGs, and it reaches 1 frame per second when captures VGA-size JPEGs.
L700 is a decent shooting camera, but just for a low budget. At some close inspection of the pictures, you can observe that while the camera’s meter does a good job at determining exposures, you can often see the hair or texts, or extreme fine details, appear fuzzy or sometimes they turn into indistinguishable blur.
It is a quiet camera, which’s noise showed up only at high settings, but still a normal thing for the cameras around this price. A little disappointing was seeing the prints, that didn’t showed up as I thought they would, even shot from ISO 50 to ISO 200(they had very little grain). The noisy thing appeared at photo shot from ISO 800 to ISO 1,600, even if is more likely to use the ISO 800 for 4×6 inch prints. Although at normal used setting (ISO 400) the camera is being really quiet. Even though on the computer’s screen you can see a fine grain, it won’t be visible on the most prints, and you can observe a seriously loss of details.
Ignoring the other image problems, the L700 is a very good color-reproducer, because of its white balance which works extremely well even under studio lights, and its colors look neutral, without any signs of warming nor cooling the pictures.
For the tempting price of which Samsung Digimax L700 benefits, and for its -$200 category, it offers to the more advanced users, plenty of features, and its above-average white balance makes you forget about the lack of details and the printing fidelity.