Samsung Digimax 301

Author's product rating:   

Picture Quality	Excellent
Range & Quality of Features	Diverse
Ease of Use	Easy
Durability	Good
Overall Look & Design	Good
Value for Money	Good

Advantages:	Takes sharp, clear photos
Disadvantages:	Eats batteries

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

I have never owned a digital camera before and was eager to buy one so I could uploads lots of pictures onto Ebay, make a fortune and retire. First three steps of my mission have been accomplished, i.e. bought the camera, taken loads of pictures and have uploaded onto Ebay. My final wish is in the hands of the bidders.

Why did I choose the Samsung Digimax 301 in particular:

I wish I could say it was because I am very knowledgeable about cameras and photography in general, had done lots of research, read other reviews on Ciao and came to an informed choice. Sorry to disappoint the purists, but I bought the Digimax 301 purely by chance. I happened upon a special offer on the Boots.com website and saw they were selling this camera for £64.99 instead of the usual £99.99! Excellent.

What kind of camera was I looking for?

I wanted a camera with an LCD screen so I could review my ‘photos before deciding which ones to keep, because my previous foray into the world of the digital camera was with a tiny 2” x 2” Digicam which my boss had loaned me and which he found perfectly adequate for on-site ‘photos when he was checking building works in progress. He would just point and shoot and come back to the office and upload them onto the computer. I tried it for myself but I needed to photograph small items for my Ebay selling and I just couldn’t get a decent picture.

Before I purchased the camera, I asked my husband to come and take a look whilst I still had the ‘photo and details of the Samsung 301 up on screen. “Hmm..” he nodded, wisely. “It’s got 3.2 mega pixels, that’s a great bargain, go for it!” So I did.

24 hours later I was the proud owner of a very nice camera.

First impressions:

The metal casing is silver in colour, the camera measures 98 x 51 x 38mm and weighs 122g (without batteries and card). It has an LCD colour monitor of 1.6” of a fixed focus type with two steps manual adjustment. There is of course, an optical virtual image viewfinder.

What comes in the package:

As well as the camera:

2 AA Alkaline Batteries
Pouch
Video Cable
USB cable
Camera strap
User manual
Product Warranty
Software CD

Not included in the pack but can be purchased separately:

SD memory card
Battery pack (SBP-3603)
AC adapter (3.3V)
And also a Digimax Battery 1-Pack: SBP-1103 Kit: Battery charger, rechargeable battery and AC adapter (5V)

What I did first:

After inserting the batteries and hearing a trilling beep I eagerly made inroads into the Users Manual. Hmm. As I said, I know very little about digital cameras so all the bells and whistles and explanatory jargon was mostly lost on me. The step- by- step how to “Start the Recording Mode” had me flummoxed for a start. Because, you see, this little camera will also take 1 hour of video recording. But I only wanted to take a still picture. It took a while for me to realise that the word ‘recording’ in the Manual is actually referring to “Photographing a still image.” Ah! I see!

The camera comes with an internal 16MB Flash Memory which is adequate for me at the moment. Later on, I can buy an SD Memory Card, Multimedia Card (up to 256MB guaranteed). I know that, because it says so in the manual.

So, I pressed the power button and the LCD monitor lit up with the Samsung logo. When the logo disappeared I realised I could see my office, through the LCD monitor. I pointed the camera towards the floor and wiggled my legs. Yep, those were my legs moving! The LCD monitor displayed information about the shooting functions and selections, of which I was to get to know a little better over the following couple of days (but believe me, I’m still on a learning curve here!)

The image sizes available are 2048 x 1536, 1600 x 1200, 1024 x 768and 640 x 640. This is to select the image size appropriate for your application. You can select from STILL, IMAGE, PHOTO FRAME, NIGHT SCENE and MySET modes. The higher the resolution, the lower the number of available shots will be because high resolution images require more memory than lower resolution images. I didn’t know all this stuff at first, but having followed the instructions to set the date and time (not necessary but I wanted to see if I could do it), I pointed the camera out of my office window and took a wonderful picture of our works shed. The result was a crystal clear image which would have been more impressive had it been a beautiful building. I took the picture from about 30 metres away and the resolution was set at 2048 x 1536, which is the default setting but you can change it via the menu.

Using the LCD Monitor to Adjust the Camera Settings:

I pressed the Menu button to navigate through the menus and sub menus. I still haven’t perfected this yet. The manual is a tad confusing if you are not camera-literate. I don’t own an up-to-date mobile phone, for instance, so am unused to flicking through these fancy menus. The blue 5-function menu button itself is an oval shape set horizontally surrounded by a silver ‘pad’.

1. The MENU button itself: To switch the menu on and off and to press OK when a mode is selected.

2. When the menu is displayed on the LCD monitor, pressing the LEFT button makes the cursor shift to the left tab. When the menu is not displayed on the LCD monitor, the LEFT button operates as the FLASH button.

3. The RIGHT button shifts the cursor to the right tab and also doubles as the SELF-TIMER.

4. The UP button is used to move up the submenu cursor. When the menu is not displayed on the monitor, the UP button operates as the voice memo button.

5. DOWN button which, when the menu is showing, moves from the main menu to a submenu, or to move down the submenu cursor and it also acts as the PLAY/PAUSE button during movie mode.

· I have to confess, that it is only when I actually sat down to type up this review, with the camera and the User’s Manual in front of me that I have actually learned a little more about how to use the menu button! Initially, it was hit and miss with a lot of bleeps indicating I was asking the camera to do something it couldn’t do whilst it was in LCD mode. There’s a lesson for you! If the jargon has got you flummoxed, sit down and put together a review and that way you have to work through quietly and methodically exactly how everything works. (This little aside is aimed at the novice users, like myself. Novice users who desperately want to get on and take pictures so tend to skim through ‘heavy’ instructions.

What I did next:

I started taking pictures, of course! Easy, peasy! Because most of the items I wanted to photograph where small (e.g. lipsticks and eyeshadows), they needed to be photographed in close-up and with the detail of the manufacturer’s make and colour description clearly visible to potential buyers. This is purely a personal thing, but I found that by using a tripod to steady the camera it was far easier than a hand-held attempt. I have rheumatoid arthritis which causes pain in my wrists and because the camera is so small, holding it and flicking through the menu with my thumb then depressing the power button was very uncomfortable. Placing the camera on the tripod enabled me to use one finger to depress the buttons and I let the tripod do the fiddly work of getting the distance and position just right. If you have flexible fingers and wrists I should imagine you’d be able to manage just fine without the use of a tripod.

To take the close up pictures, I decided to use the MACRO mode. Why? Because I’d used the NORMAL mode and the detail wasn’t as I would have liked. I had no idea what the MACRO mode was. After some research, I discovered that MACRO is used to bring out minute detail in close-up work (it also uses more memory). This little camera came up trumps in the Macro mode - see my picture below!

Further features of the Samsung Digimax 301:

I won’t make a long list of its features, but this will give you the general idea:

The camera has a small dial on the back of the camera near the top with which you can select the working mode you want. This camera has 6 recording modes:

STILL IMAGE: Two types of focus modes - Macro (0.19 - 0.21m)
Normal (1.0m - infinity)

MySET: Allows you to save frequently used shooting settings to use later

VOICE RECORDING: A voice recording mode can be recorded for as long as the available recording time of the memory capacity allows (Max: 1 hr)

MOVIE CLIP: Using the image size: 320 x 240
Movie clip file type : avi

PHOTO FRAME: This allows you to add frame-like borders to a still image and save it. There are 4 types of frames available, one of which is a heart shaped frame - ideal for taking a photo of your loved one on Valentine’s Day!

Brief description of what else it does:

The following functions are available:

SIZE (as outlined at the beginning of this review)
QUALITY: Super fine, Normal, High and Low
METERING: Multi, Spot,
SHARP: Soft, Normal, Vivid
EFFECT: Black & White, Normal and Sepia

One of the many features I like is the LOCK key. This is used to protect some or all shots from being accidentally erased. It also unprotects images that have been previously protected (UNLOCK).

Once you’ve finished playing around and have uploaded your best images onto your computer, you can delete all the shots you don’t want.

The only problem I have encountered so far is that this camera positively eats batteries! Most of the photos I took had to be taken with the flash, and I found that in the Macro mode for close up snaps I was only getting about 12 pictures before the LOW BATTERY! Warning came on. It’s as well I’d bought in a large pack of batteries because I don’t have a battery charger yet.

Finally, once I had the ‘photos I wanted uploaded to the computer:

The Camera comes with its own Software CD-ROM for the MGI PhotoSuite 111 SE (only compatible with Windows). Very easy to set up, very fast upload of images from your camera to your computer.

It will allow you to do many things such as rotate and crop. You may well ask “So what? So does other photographic software, such as PhotoShop.” We actually have PhotoShop installed on our computer but I find it frustrating, mainly because I think it’s aimed at the more professional photographers or computer literate people. With the PhotoSuite, I found I was able to select the pictures I wanted and crop/uncrop/resize until I was happy with the outcome without losing the on-screen image somewhere in the bowels of the computer. Something which seems to happen frequently to me with PhotoShop when I’ve uploaded scanned images. Other features include Touch Up, Special Effects, Stitching (that was fun)

One minor niggle is that the grey plastic cover housing the USB connection terminal, Video connection point and DC input connection point at the side of the camera is quite flimsy and I can see it coming off one day due to wear and tear.

The other thing that annoys me is, as I mentioned earlier, this camera uses a lot of battery power. Now, not having owned a digital camera before, I have nothing to compare it with, although I have heard others say that they can be heavy on batteries. It’s so heavy on batteries that I feel a little reticent having the LCD screen on whilst I scroll through the menu functions to try and learn more about what each is for. So, I’m definitely investing in a battery re-charger (and some rechargeable batteries - I don’t want to blow my camera up!) In the meantime, I suppose I should be thankful for it’s AUTO POWER off facility. It’s a plus or a minus, depending on how you look at it. A plus because the camera switches itself off after 1 minute if you set it down whilst arranging your subject, a minus when you’ve got the subject in place and you hear the damn thing beep which warns you it’s just switched itself off. It takes 6 seconds to become ready once you’ve switched the power back on. Not very long, but frustrating! The answer is of course to make use of the facility for you to select the time the camera switches itself off which can be between 1 and 10 minutes. So, I’ve just set mine to 5 minutes … because I’ve just learned how to whilst fiddling with the menu to try and describe the function to you. Think I better put it back down to 1 minute, don’t you?!!

All in all, it’s a nifty little number for a nervous novice. I was pleased with the quality of the photos I took (and after all, that’s the most important thing, isn’t it?) and once I got the hang of the menu, found it fairly easy to access the functions I needed. If you take a look at the Boots website now, you may find it still on offer. At £64.99 I think I got a nice camera but I really don’t think it’s worth much more than that, considering it was reduced from almost £100 and I am aware that they are selling for around £75 elsewhere.

But I will come back and update this review once I’ve used the camera for a little longer and in different conditions etc. I’ll try and make it snappy!

In the meantime, I’m just going to enjoy this little camera!