Perfect Point and Shoot?

Samsung has been designing and producing some really great products lately. From TVs to Cameras... their designs are simple and modern. Their materials are high-end looking. And the fit and finish is pretty decent. This camera follows these design decisions. The design is somewhat of a homage to the vintage cameras of yesteryear. A simple layout with the lens on the front. Matte black metal casing makes it feel durable and well built. The menu selection on the top near your right hand with a power and shutter button. Simple right? Sort of... I first saw this camera on a web site and my first reaction was, "Why the heck would anyone put so many buttons on the back of this camera!?!" I'm all about keeping devices simple. Especially a point and shoot. Why would they complicated this simple design with all these buttons? Right here there's a critical choice to be made by people buying this camera. This initial shock of input may and will turn potential buyers off. It almost turned me off of it. The back of the camera consists of a medium sized screen. Not as large as it's competitors but with all those buttons it's nessisary. There are 13 square buttons and one round button surrounding the bottom and right side of the screen. Whoa! Then the zoom toggle, a up and down switch is on the upper right hand side of the back of the camera. OK... here's where things change and as alcoholics sometimes have is a moment of clarity. The main menu allows you to go through a number of modes. Fully Auto, Movie Camera (I'll go into that later), PhotoGallerie, ASR(anti shake), Effects, & Scenes (manual type of presets for shots like sunsets, backlit scenes, etc). To elaborate how all these buttons work I'll use Manual as an example since it has the most customizable settings. When you first turn on the camera in Manual mode the retracted lens comes to life, the LCD on the back turns on showing the image of what the lens is pointed at, and a label/icon above or next to each button shows up. Now this is interesting. The buttons are laid out in a backwards L with 7 square buttons under the LCD screen, one round button at the lower right corner of the LCD with a triangle indicating playback, and 6 square buttons running up the right side of the screen. The positioning is set for your two thumbs to be in position to use the different buttons. At first touch you notice that the buttons detect your touch and activate a rollover. As you press the button a menu comes up showing the optional settings. This allows the opposite thumb to make the selection like creating crosshairs on a X Y axis. Everything on the camera is one level down only allowing two clicks to access whatever you want. Brilliant!!!! This has to be the most simple camera I have ever used! One click with my right thumb on ISO shows 100, 200, 400, 800, 1000. I rollover my left thumb over the buttons on the bottom of the screen to highlight the options and click once to select ISO400. With my left thumb I select 1m with a menu of 1m (1024x768), 3m (240x1680, 5m (2688x2016), 7m (3136x2352), 10m (3648x2736). Yeah... that's 10mp (mega pixels)! Cool. Again the second click, this time with my right hand I select 5m. It's that simple and quick. I love it. This is sooooo cool! F-Stop, Shutter Speed, it's all there. Great control and great flexibility. I've rarely used the full 10 megapixels and mainly just keep it on 5m allowing for my 2GB SD card (purchased separately) to take on more pics. Flash can be Auto, Auto Fill-in, or off. It's all there. The one bummer is that the only file format seems to be .jpg (JPEG). No RAW format available on this one. Which is OK. I have a Canon 20D that I shoot RAW format in so it's not a bid deal for me. JPEG are perfect for eBay or web pics anyway. So it depends on what you want. The lens is a 3x optical Schneider-KREUZNACH (7.4-22.2mm) which has some good optics... even does Macro really well. The digital zoon is ok... I never use it because I don't think it's sharp enough. But for getting the bigfoot or ufo shot you'll be in luck ;-) All in all I'm very pleased with this camera. Size is perfect. It's stylish. Super easy to use (once you get over the button shock). Battery life is great (full weekend in LA without a recharge - 300 photos). And image quality is great, though ISO 800 and 1000 show a lot of grain in the image. The bang for the buck here is amazing! $229 for a 10mp camera! How can you go wrong? Well... my one complaint is the amount of time it takes to actually take the picture. It's not as bad as other digital cameras I've used... but it does pause for a half second or so to focus and meter before taking the shot. Somewhat annoying but livable.