The twin analog dials on Samsung’s TL320 point-and-shoot, indicating battery life and remaining memory, strike a retro chord on what’s otherwise a very modern camera.
A 24mm wide-angle 24-240mm lens with 5x optical zoom, 3″ HVGA Amoled display and 720p H.264 video recording top the feature list. It also has a 12mp sensor, HDMI output and both hardware and software image stabilization.
It can shoot in aperture priority, shutter priority or full manual; has a “comprehensive suite of automatic controls” for the rest of us; and 11 preset scene-shooting modes, face detection and “Beauty Shot,” which smooths out skin tones. Samsung also pitches Smart Album, software that allows for easy searching of specific images in your collection, which it’ll bundle with the cam.
It’ll be offered in black and silver in May, for $380.
Looks pretty sexy. Samsung always has well designed looking products.
Uh, isn’t 24-240mm a 10x zoom?
#3:
Optical zoom is the enhancement you can get out of the lenses. The other 5X is digital zoom, which is just resizing the picture to take up more space.
Poor poor Schneider. Zeiss too. I wasn’t aware of too many Schneider lenses made in Korea :p Oh Schneider designed… thanks Samsung.
The retro dials and buttons are ok, but the fuel gauges? Maybe a bit over the top.
Man, that’s a nice-looking camera. Ridiculous dials are awesome, and I really like the fill for memory, I hadn’t seen that before. You’ll probably be able to turn off the “shots remaining” option on the main screen!
It makes me giggle every time I see one of those Schneider lenses with the name of my hometown printed right next to it. Now that I’ve been living in the US for so many years and my youth in Germany has more and more turned into a dream-like nebula of memories it almost seems bizarre that this little town would produce anything that makes it outside the city boundaries. Good for them!
I don’t think the dials are ridiculous at all. I love the quick glance it takes to check the batt & memory. Kind of like when car spedometers went all digital in the 80s, then they realized everyone hated them and went back to analog dials. Yeah, they take a lot of real estate, but are oh so useful, and they look awesome.
Bummer: I love the look, but being part of the old-ish generation, I insist that my cameras have a viewfinder. I need reading glasses to see anything within arm’s reach (i.e., the LCD display), and you can imagine that I don’t plan on flipping glasses on&off as I look directly at the subject and then at the camera display.
I don’t insist on SLR, but do insist on a viewfinder of some sort so I only need focus at one distance.
Tis pretty, I like.
How many licks does it take to get to the center of those dials to fix them when they break? We’re aiming for “no moving parts” for a reason, no? I love dials — that’s why I liked the solid-state kids’ watches with LCD dials that McDonald’s was handing out with every Happy Meal, waaay back in 1990.
@ #9 You think it would be easier to fix/replace a tiny LCD if it was in the same spot?
@ #10 They may be very well built dials, but I’m sure it takes a lot more to kill an LCD or LED.
I’m very excited about this camera but very skeptical at the same time.
I’m excited because I love 24mm lenses, and I love having a lot of zoom. Before, you had to compromise on one or the other: Big-zoom cameras didn’t go wider than 28mm (and when you’re that wide, an extra 4mm does make a noticeable difference), and cameras with 24mm didn’t zoom past 100mm or so (and all had really terrible optics, really fuzzy lenses… except for the Lumix LX3 which only zooms in to 60mm, but is the one I got since I do want a sharp 24mm that fits in my pocket. Image quality is good enough that I can crop significantly, so the 60mm limitation is not so bad). The small-ish size of this Samsung (I can probably carry it in my jacket pocket, and I live in an area with bad weather so that’s small enough) and manual exposure controls (otherwise fuggetaboutit) make this camera sound just about perfect. And Samsung’s digicam interfaces tend to be a pleasure to use.
But the last time I bought a Samsung digital camera – an NV24HD – the lens was such a piece of junk, I had to return it. Not sharp at ALL. (Pictures from the NV24HD next to the LX3 are like night and day, sharpness-wise). So apparently Samsung feels that it’s OK to sell cameras with blurry optics. That puts a damper on my excitement over this new camera.
Oh yeah, and I too can swear that this retro-dials thing has been featured (probably on BoingBoing) before, but I can’t find it…
Actually, #2/Jeff is right: 24-240mm is 10x optical. But the TL320 is actually 24-120mm (equivalent) and thus 5x optical.
I second #7 cellocgw’s lament about the lack of a viewfinder. I don’t have bad eyes (yet), but this has always seemed a integral part of a camera for me. Maybe I’m just uncoordinated.
And yes, I know how hard it is to find a point and shoot camera that doesn’t have a viewfinder these days.
#14 ME: Er that does have a viewfinder, not doesn’t.
#11 – I would bet money that an LCD is far easier to break than those analog dials. I once had my Canon PS on a lanyard around my neck while bike riding and when I stood, it swung forward and gently tapped the padded handlebar right on the screen. Dead. Needed a whole new camera. I don’t think those dials would even have been scratched by a similar bump.
They borrowed this idea from the lovely Epson rd-1 digital rangefinder:
http://www.dpreview.com/news/0603/06031502epsonrd1s.asp
Mark Duffy
The Epson RD-1, the first digital rangefinder, already had a couple of gauges on it for memory and battery life.
http://a.img-dpreview.com/news/0603/epsonrd1sspecs.jpg
#16
Absolutely not true – your version of a “light tap” must coincide with my version of a “faulty product.”
Light taps don’t break LCD displays, especially not small ones. However it is extremely easy to break a flimsy plastic needle. Just pushing it to the side would make the entire reading false.
Samsung has been developing a market niche of making beautiful compact cameras which take crummy photos.