Samsung HZ15W Digital Camera Review

Samsung's most recent entry into the burgeoning field of compact ultrazooms comes packed with a 10x zoom 24mm wide-angle lens and a decent set of manual controls. While the camera is far too big to fit into your skinny jeans when you go out clubbing, it's smaller than many ultrazooms on the market, and will easily fit into a coat pocket or handbag. Its market price is $330.

One feature we really enjoyed about the HZ15W was the amount of  manual control on offer. In addition to program mode, and a truckload of scene modes, it has fully manual exposure controls. However, you can only set the aperture in this mode to maximum or minimum, with no steps in-between, which limits flexibility. We also would have appreciated aperture- and shutter-priority modes.

Another much appreciated feature was auto exposure bracketing, which takes photos at multiple exposure levels in quick succession, and is a feature which is rarely seen anymore in point-and-shoot cameras.

The HZ15W also impressed us with a plethora of playback displays, editing controls, and printing options.

Performance (read in-depth performance coverage at DigitalCameraInfo.com)

Generally, the HZ15W delivered exemplary image quality. It had accurate color, excellent sharpness and resolution, a decent burst mode, image stabilization that made a noticeable improvement and decent video quality. The one area of trouble (and it is a big one) is high ISO image noise. At ISOs 400 and below, the noise was perfectly acceptable, but at 800 and 1600 it ramped up significantly, which makes the camera a bit problematic to use in low light conditions.

Comparisons (read in-depth comparisons at DigitalCameraInfo.com)

We compared the HZ15W to three other cameras: the Canon PowerShot SD970 IS, the Nikon Coolpix S630, and the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX580. All of these cameras have substantially lower zoom range than the Samsung, and hence much smaller bodies.
The Canon sits about even with the Samsung in terms of image performance. They have similar levels of color accuracy, but the Canon edges ahead in noise, image stabilization and video sharpness, albeit with only a 3x zoom. The HZ15W on the other hand, has better resolution and shot to shot speed. The Canon also has a more pleasant user interface, but the Samsung has more manual controls.

The Nikon Coolpix S630 has a decent zoom lens (6x), but lacks the wide angle coverage of the Samsung. It performed significantly worse in video testing due to lack of controls in that mode, plus its standard definition video resolution versus 720p for the Samsung. In still images, on the other hand, the Nikon has substantially better color accuracy and image noise, and decent resolution. While it doesn't have manual controls, if that's not important, to you and you don't need HD video, it's a very good camera.

The Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX580 is the only camera we compared with the Samsung that actually had more extensive controls. In addition to manual shooting mode, the Panasonic also has aperture priority, shutter priority, and the ability to set the aperture across an entire range of settings, not just the min/max of the HZ15W. However, in lab testing, it scored almost universally worse than the Samsung, barring image noise. Most noticeably in color and resolution, it didn't stack up nearly as well.

For a more in-depth review, visit the Samsung HZ15W Review at our partner DigitalCameraInfo.com