By Charlemagne Losaria
Are you in the market for a ?smart camera? but do not want to burn a hole in your pocket? Well, look no further as South Korean tech giant Samsung unveiled earlier this year the most affordable member of their new generation line-up of smart cameras. The Samsung ST150F smart camera is small in size yet packs a punch in terms of nifty features.
What?s in the box?
? Unit
? Battery
? Wall charger
? USB cable
? Manuals
? White Pouch
? 8GB microSD Card
? Lanyard
Functionalities
The Samsung ST150F smart camera is a 16.2 megapixel smart camera paired with a 5x optical zoom lens. Add those to the 25mm wide angle-lens, and it allows you to capture virtually everything in front. It also features a F2.5 bright lens which helps produce high quality images even on low lighting conditions. It supports HD video recording with a resolution of up to 720p.
Sample still shots below:
It doesn?t over saturate the images and colors are very natural yet vivid. The ST150F comes with built-in photo editing apps that allows you to add filters and effects or edit the images if needed (though these images looks excellent even without the edits). Panoramic shots are also supported.
Intelligent LCD
The ST150F has a 3.0 inch QVGA Intelligent LCD that improves contrast and resolution. It does that by automatically adjusting the LCD brightness by detecting your current environment?s illumination. It also features the Samsung Smart Camera UI 2.0 which allows for easy interaction.
Connectivity
Thanks to its built-in Wi-Fi chip, you can easily upload your photos and videos to Facebook, Picasa, and YouTube. You can also send your photos and videos via the built-in email client.
Press the dedicated Wi-Fi button and you can wirelessly link and sync your smart phones and tablets with this smart camera using the Samsung Smart Camera app. The app is readily available on the Apple store and Google Play.
Once linked, you can use your smartphone to interact with the camera in a number of ways. One way is to remotely interact with the smart camera through the camera?s viewfinder. In short, you see on your phone?s screen what the camera sees and you can remotely trigger zoom and the camera capture button.
There is also the Autoshare function which allows the camera to wirelessly dump captured images automatically to your phone.
The Auto Backup functionality lets the camera save photos and videos stored in the camera to your PC or Mac.
Meanwhile, the Cloud functionality allows you to save your images and videos to a cloud service such as Microsoft sky drive for later viewing on your smart phone, tablets and PC. Both functionalities give users an extra peace of mind knowing they have backups of their files both locally and in the cloud.
Conclusion
The Samsung Smart Camera ST150F supports microSD and comes in white, silver, pink and black. We really liked what we saw with the ST150F. We were surprised to find all these cool features on a budget camera.
It takes excellent shots even on low light conditions and supports HD video recording. The built-in features are very handy, especially linking the device with smartphones and computers for easy back-up of files. Being able to control the camera from a smartphone or tablet is another feature we fell in love with.
You can find online resellers selling the ST150F brand new for less than P5,000. Now that folks is truly a bang for the buck.
