Samsung ST600

Features And Specs

Samsung’s recently launched ST600 is a dual screen camera and an upgrade of last year’s ST5500. The camera offers many improvements in terms of features and specs but we will have to find out if these updates make the camera perform better or not.

Features and Specs
The Samsung ST600 has the same ½.33-inch sensor as the older Samsung ST550 but packs more pixels than the ST550 (14.2 vs. 12.2 mega pixels). It also has a slightly longer 5x (27mm to 135 mm) optical zoom lens than the 4.6x zoom on the ST500. The lens aperture size is F3.5 at wide angle while it is F5.9 at tele which is normal for a compact camera. Samsung has also upgraded the ST600’s 3.5-inch WVGA LCD touchscreen with a higher resolution than on the ST550 and the front display has also been upped to a 1.8-inch TFT LCD with 116k resolution.

The ST600 comes with all the smart features that Samsung has for its compact line of cameras. It has seven shooting modes - Smart Auto, Auto, Smart Movie, Program, Dual IS and Scene modes. The Smart Auto mode takes a photo by detecting a scene and choosing an appropriate scene mode; a mode that’s helpful for first-time users. The Smart Movie mode also determines the scene automatically prior to recording the video. There is no shutter speed and aperture-size changing option in the program mode which is a bit disappointing considering the price tag it carries. The usual Beauty Shot mode is included and totally there are 13 scene modes to choose from. Face Detection (up to 10 faces), face register (up to 6 faces), smile detection and blink detection are also present. Samsung also featured Smart Filters (miniature, vignette, fish-eye 1, fish-eye 2, sketch and defog) to make photos more interesting or unique to look at.

The camera also lets you adjust saturation, contrast and sharpness in the camera; plus there is an ACB (Auto Contrast Balance) feature to correct the exposure for high contrast subjects and backgrounds. Focusing mode includes auto, macro, one touch shooting, center AF, Multi AF (up to 9 points), and smart touch AF. There are three metering modes - center, multi and spot. Drive mode includes continuous, motion capture (6 VGA photos per second) and AEB (takes 3 consecutive photos with different exposures). ISO speed option starts from ISO80 to ISO3200. So, there are various shooting modes and features despite the lack of usual P, A, S, M modes which we expected to see from a camera in this price range. The front LCD offers many useful features for shooting portraits and it was a fun and useful feature.

Playback mode offers in-camera photo editing that allows you to apply different smart filter effects to the photos. The Smart Album feature also is nifty and categorizes photos by month or date to make viewing easier in the camera. The maximum image pixel that can be recorded is 4320x3240 and there are three image quality options - super fine, fine and normal. The Samsung ST600 records 720p HD video at 30fps with mono audio. Optical zoom is available during video recording but audio is disabled during zooming. The camera has internal memory of 30MB and it supports microSD for external storage.