Digital Camera Review: Samsung L74 Wide Angle Lens for taking Organizing Makeover Photos

Back in May I wrote about a couple wide angle camera I was considering.  See

• Looking for a Digital Camera with a Wide Angle Lens for Taking Real Estate or Room Makeover Pictures?
• Update to Digital Cameras with a Wide Angle Lens

Last month a flurry of wide angle cameras hit the market! The Samsung L74 was only $237 and had tons of features that sounded amazing so I bought one.  Big Mistake.

I have owned several Olympus digital cameras and have used Nikon, Sony & Canon cameras.  They each have their own strengths and weaknesses, but at least some consideration of the user experience went into the design. Using this Samsung was like a bad dream. It has so many odd and poorly conceived features you have to wonder if anyone on their design team ever thought to at least try out their competition's cameras. Here are the problems I have with this camera.

1. Wrist Strap. For starters the wrist strap holder is a little metal bar that sticks out from the camera into your right hand when using the camera. Ant's quite sharp. Every other camera I've owned has it rounded and recessed so you don't feel it. At least they should have made it easy to remove so that it doesn't stick into your hand while you are trying to take pictures.

2. Batteries. Figuring out how to get the battery took nearly 10 minutes!  I've never had to look at the directions to put a battery in any of the hundreds of battery-operated devices we own. The description said this camera uses AA batteries - it does not. I gave this camera a try only because I thought it would run on my rechargeable AAs.  I need to have spares with me because I use my camera to photograh my work in client homes.

3. Touch screen. At first I this was a neat idea. In reality, you have to use a STYLUS PEN to operate it!!!  I tried using my finger nails but it did operate properly. When I'm taking pictures the last thing I want to worry about is finding the stylus pen and then how to hold on to it while I'm taking the photos. There isn't a place in the camera to stick the pen when you aren't using it.

4. Transfering Photos to PC.  It took about a half hour before we were able to actually take pictures after opening the camera. I've never had to look at a camera's instruction book to get to the point of taking the first picture. To operate special functions - yes - but just to take a simple picture?  Once we did get a few pics taken, getting them transferred to the PC was an even bigger pain in the neck. My husband is a computer engineer and he had trouble!  Turns out you can't move the pix directly to your computer with a USB cable from the camera's memory like you can with every other camera out there. You can't even do it from the disk.  You have to install their software and use their software to make the transfer!!  The camera instructions have multiple warnings throughout the manual that you will lose your photos if you don't use their software. This is ridiculous. You should be able to easily & quickly transfer the photos to ANY PC anywhere with that disk.  Even worse, you have to transfer the photos from camera memory to the disk, then you can move it to your computer.

5. Picture Quality.  The picture quality was not the worst I've seen, but it also wasn't great. I use photos of my work on my website (see www.neatandsimple.com/gallery) and in my e-books.  The pictures don't have to be perfect, but they need to at least look good enough to see the work clearly. That means I need a camera that takes really good quality indoor shots. 

What I Bought Instead

As of October 1, 2007, there are a lot more cameras with wide angle lens out there.  I was hoping Olympus would make one and they did!  So I bought the Olympus Stylus FE-290 7MP Digital Camera with 4x Wide Angle Optical Zoom at about the same price as the Samsung from Amazon.com.  I've had it about a month now and I LOVE it!!!!  It even takes great VIDEOS!!!!  I'll eventually post a review of this separately with some sample photos and videos.