Samsung TL34HD Point-and-Shoot Digital Camera

19.03.2009
If you often find that your friends wander off, birds take flight, or the sun dips below the horizon or accordingly, the Samsung TL34HD (US$300 as of 3/16/09) might be a good option for you. The TL34HD eliminates a lot of the menu-diving that other feature-heavy digital cameras require.

The TL34HD's 3-inch touchscreen makes the camera a cinch to operate, and the icons that border the screen give an instant view of all your settings. Tapping each icon with your finger pops up a menu of alternatives. If you can't remember what each icon means, holding your finger on it for a moment brings up a written description.

The screen itself is a beauty, too. Though 230,000-pixel displays are now common on digital cameras, the TL34HD ups the ante with a beautiful 460,000-pixel LCD. It renders images sharply, offers plenty of contrast in bright light, and lends a sophisticated look to the icons, text, and user-interface animations. The camera has just a few physical buttons--power, shutter release, zoom control, menu, and playback--plus a mode-selector dial.

While the touchscreen is a major draw, the TL34HD doesn't skimp on photographic features, either. The 3.6X-optical-zoom lens has a 28mm wide angle that works perfectly for expansive landscape shots, and the camera's optical stabilization reduces the effects of shaky hands. Automatic face detection sets the focus and , and the additional smile and blink modes delay the shutter until your subjects look their best.

The single manual mode is a bit limited, but it's nice to have: You can set the exposure time, and you have a choice of at each zoom level. The TL34HD's built-in flash pops up from the top of the camera, giving it a little extra distance from the lens and reducing the chance of red-eye in your portraits. Should you catch the dreaded red-eye anyway, the camera's automatic red-eye removal function works well, too.

I took the camera to the new California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco to put it through its paces. For most shots, the camera performed with no discernable shutter lag. Sometimes, however, I saw 'capturing' and 'processing' messages on the screen for tough low-light and macro shots of small plants and animals, so in such cases the shot-to-shot times could suffer. I loved the ability to touch the screen to select the focus point, but my experiments with the manual mode often led me to set the too narrow. Fortunately, the high-resolution screen made zooming into the image and spotting my mistakes easy.