I’m the king of rock and roll - completely…

You can’t beat a bit of Prefab Sprout, eh?

Anyways, times to pimp my Flickr photos in case you haven’t been and seen them lately.

Over the Christmas sales I bought myself a new Samsung S1030 camera, a 10·1 megapixel digital camera with a 3x Optical zoom and the ability to take it in to manual mode where you can alter all settings that I am trying to learn about, like exposure, ISO settings etc.

As a quick review, the camera is very nice. Has a very quick start-up time and is ready to shoot much faster than my current n95 (6 seconds from active standby to camera app on a bad day!) The pictures it takes come out very crisp and with it being 10 megapixels it gives you a big enough resolution that when you resample it to 50% it looks really nice.

There are 10 built in scene modes on the camera of which I’ve so far found Sunset and Night to be very nice. Sunset adds a lovely warm glow to the photo and really increases details found in a slightly dark situation. Night is very nice for capturing a contrast of light and dark such as a lit up Runcorn Bridge. But beware, as with any night mode you have to be perfectly still otherwise it blurs to buggery, a tripod is pretty much a must on that mode.

I have a few gripes with it after using it for just under a month now. Firstly, it accepts standard AA batteries, 2 of them, and it eats them like I eat, well, any food. I bought it when in London and picked up 8 Panasonic Xtreme Power alkalines from WHSmith Travel at Waterloo station along with an Optima 2GB SD card. The camera constantly complained that the batteries were low after an extended period of usage. I’ve found if you put Lithium AAs in then they last like a racehorse, but Lithiums are still extremely expensive ~£4 / 2. But luckily I had a Energizer rep who gave me a crap load of them free a couple of months back that have just been sitting on my desk since. They’re now back home and going to be used exclusively in the camera.

My second niggle is the build quality. Overall it feels the business, except for the directional pad used for accessing and controlling the menu system. For some reason it’s made with a completely different (read: tacky) feel from the rest of the buttons and is slightly higher raised which means that it rocks more and I think it’s mainly the feel and rockiness that makes it feel cheap. Luckily all the other buttons are easy to get to and everything feels well built. The jog dial feels especially snug on mine, especially considered to one I used to have on an old Fuji FinePix.

Third problem is that it has a proprietary connector. I thought the whole world had decided upon mini-USB now? I mean even Nokia has decided on it. But, alas, Samsung had to create some awkward thin USB > Camera interface which just means if I lose the cable I’m SOL. On the upside it does comply with “USB Mass Storage“, unlike the evil Sony camera my Mum has, and so when plugged in just appears right there on my KDE desktop. I can tell you supporting standards is very useful to someone who runs a non-Windows deslktop, the 3 hours I spent trying to get the Sony to work over Christmas was not fun!

I mean, make no mistakes, this is a budget camera. But for someone who a) doesn’t have a huge budget and b) isn’t an amazing photographer it really does just do. I like it anyways, and of course getting on sale at Half Price never hurts.