ISO Tests

The Samsung i5 offers four ISO settings: Auto, 100, 200, and 400. In Auto mode, the camera will also select other ISO settings as needed (ISO 50, 150, etc,.) As with most compact digital cameras, noise levels increase substantially when you increase sensitivity beyond ISO 100. ISO 100 offers fairly noise-free images, although a fair-amount of clear "dots" from JPEG compression are visible in all images, even when shooting in the Super Fine quality mode.

ISO is similar to film speed. The higher the ISO rating, the more light sensitive the camera's image sensor becomes. Similar to film, which exhibits increased grain at faster film speeds, digital cameras also exhibit grain, which is often referred to as "noise." Higher ISO settings allow the camera to use faster shutter speeds, important when trying to capture motion, especially in less than ideal light. Since each increase in ISO also adds an increase in "noise," you will want to use the increased ISO settings only in emergency situations - thinking ahead as to how the image will be used. If large prints will be required, then you will need to stay away from higher ISO settings due to this increased noise.

Long Exposures

Considering the fact that the Samsung i5 lacks a tripod mount, I was very surprised with its excellent low light ability. When you select NIGHT mode, the i5 gives you the ability to adjust the shutter of the camera all the way from 1 second to 16 seconds. This is the length of time that the shutter will stay open to capture a scene. The longer the shutter stays open the more light that will get passed to the image sensor. A long (slow) shutter helps the camera "gather and capture" more light than is visible to the naked eye. Unfortunately, I had to send the camera back to Samsung before really getting a chance to test this feature. If I had one more day with the camera I would have gone out and taken a test shot under real night conditions, but I was able to at least "simulate" evening conditions by shutting the blinds in my daughters room, turning off the lights, and closing the door, in order to provide a "long exposure" test shot from the Samsung i5. Let me set the stage for this test shot. It was a dark, rainy day, so the light that you see coming in around the blinds weren't enough to really add much light to the room. The overall brightness of the room was equivalent to dusk. With all that said take a look at the photograph below. The image on the left was shot in automatic mode without the flash, the image on the right was shot in NIGHT mode with a 12 second exposure. For both images, I set the camera on a dresser and set the self-timer. This was the only way I could snap a picture without having to physically press the shutter - which would have moved the camera and blurred both images.

The long-exposure was surprisingly clean from noise, very unexpected in a camera of this size and feature set. Now, if only Samsung had added a tripod mount.

Audio & Video Modes

The i5 features a full screen 640x480 MPEG-4 video mode that records at 30 frames-per-second (fps) with audio. Unlike most cameras in its class, the i5 allows you to use the optical zoom while recording video. Use the zoom sparingly in video mode since the camera mutes the sound while you zoom - most likely because of the audio noise that the zoom mechanism would cause. Video quality at 640x480 (30fps) was very good and thanks to MPEG-4 compression users can record about 3 1/2 minutes of video with sound with the internal 50MB of memory. A 512MB memory card, which currently sells on the street for about $25 after rebate, can hold more than 30 minutes of video. While it won't replace a camcorder for long events, it may just replace the camcorder for quick video clips at the beach, on the ski slope or any other place you find yourself with digital camera in hand.

The Samsung i5 also acts as an audio recorder. Up to an hour of audio can be recorded without video, great for lectures or business meetings. Users can also add a 10-second audio clip to each photograph. During the years I have been in the camera business - the audio recording feature of a digital camera is almost never used. Nevertheless, the i5 will handle the job if the need arises.

Flash Photography

Pictures taken using the flash looked great. While the flash isn't very strong, the lack of power helped to properly expose most subjects that were close to the lens. Flash pictures also tended to be free of noise. As with the case with all compact cameras, red-eye is problem since the flash is positioned so closely to the lens. Red-eye can be corrected fairly easily using PC software. The Samsung i5 also has a Safety Flash (SF) mode that turns off the flash and processes the image using algorithms designed to provide a sharp image when shooting under dim natural light. While this modes does resolve the red-eye problem in lower light, it didn't do much to help images come out "blur-free". With safety flash turned on, the shutter speed did seem to increase a bit compared with turning the flash off in auto mode, but not enough to reduce blur due to camera shake.

Overall Image Quality

Image quality was about average for a compact digital camera. While images in most lighting conditions were fairly well exposed, image noise brought down overall sharpness. Noise wouldn't be too noticeable in prints up to 5"x7" in size but on larger prints noise becomes more apparent. Pictures shot with the i5 seem to lack contrast and color saturation, although you can increase the Red, Green, and Blue values a bit within the camera . Contrast can easily be enhanced in an imaging editing program but does take extra time. Professionals typically tweak most of their images anyway, but most consumers would rather shoot, upload, share or print. Look at the photograph below to view a straight-from-the-camera image then look at the same image enhanced in Adobe Photoshop. In Photoshop all I did was use the auto adjust to get increased contrast. Contrast was probably a bit overdone in Photoshop, but this comparison will give you an idea of what can be done with images from the Samsung i5.