Samsung’s Digimax L50

August 8, 2005: Local distributor, Adeal, will release the new Samsung Digimax L50 camera next month.
Priced at $550, the Digimax L50 features a 5-megapixel CCD sensor and 6.5-18mm 3x optical zoom lens plus up to 4x digital zoom magnification. The minimum lens aperture is f3.2 and the lens focuses from 80 cm to infinity, with macro capture to 10 cm. The camera’s slim, pocket-sized camera body is equipped with a 230,000-pixel, 2.5-inch TFT LCD monitor that does double duty for composing and playing back shots. Up to 5x playback zoom magnification is provided. Shutter speeds range from 15 seconds to 1/2000 second and ISO settings range from 50 to 400. Flash and white balance settings are also adjustable.
Video clips can be recorded at VGA resolution with a frame rate of 30 fps and, because the L50 supports the MPEG-4 video format, up to an hour of video can be recorded on a 256 MB memory card. The L50 also includes a movie stabiliser function that automatically detects and corrects both lateral and vertical camera motion to deliver smooth video recordings. Users can pause and resume video recording at the touch of a button and subsequently combine the separate clips produced with this procedure into one single file. Selected parts of a movie clip can be saved into a new file during playback and still images can be extracted from video clips during playback.
The Digimax L50 also comes with a rich suite of special effects, including Colour Effect, Highlight, Photo Frame and Composite shot settings. The former accesses settings for B&W and sepia toners, plus blue, green, red and negative colour effects. Highlight lets photographers emphasise a subject by de-focusing background details, while composite shot lets th4 user divide a scene into two to four segments and combine them into a single file. The Photo Frame selection provides a choice of nine frames for superimposing on image files.
Other features include continuous shooting and auto exposure bracketing plus in-camera cropping, re-sizing and picture rotation. The L50 comes with 11 pre-set scene modes to help novice users. Among them is a Text setting, which can be used with the supplied ‘Digimax Reader’ text recognition software to convert photographed documents into editable text. The L50 is PictBridge compatible and comes with 32 MB of built-in storage capacity. An Album feature allows users to categorise and save image files by event or date. For more information, visit www.adeal.com.au or phone (03) 8369 4429.