Samsung ST60

I’m by no means a photographer but in the right situation I do like to take the occasional photo – like to have things to remember, like some nights out and to watch all the random things in my life that have happened. I never had a proper digital camera of my own, I always used to pinch one of my dad’s – so about a year ago I decided I had to get one of my own, I had been using my mobile phone but since I changed it I’d lost the amazing camera it had – so I had no choice really. I had to pick Samsung almost all my gadgets are Samsung!

Samsung

Samsung is a South Korean company that I would guess that a lot of people have heard of, since to be honest they make a little bit of everything really. They are one of the companies that happen to be one with a bit of a better reputation. So it is quite a popular brand, among others. In the past two years I’ve seen a lot of products from this company; anything from mobile phones and televisions all the way to hoovers and even microwaves. Personally I’ve had a laptop, mobile phone, a camera and even an external hard drive – so at one point I was a bit of a Samsung junkie!

ST60 Statistics

12.2 megapixel camera
TFT LCD Display
2.7inch Display Screen
Flash modes; Auto, Auto and Red Eye, Fill-in Flash, Slow Sync, Flash Off and Red Eye Fix
20Mb internal memory
SDHC card maximum 32 GB
USB connection
2 speakers
Rechargeable battery
Self-timer; 2 or 10 seconds
3.58 inches wide, 2.2 inches high, and 0.6 inches deep

My Experience

I’ve had the camera for just over a year so I’ve spent a lot of time playing with the various settings on the camera and I’ve had varying times with it. In the box, all I got was my camera, a cable and the battery; well the wrist strap to but that attaches to the camera anyways. To be honest it’s all you really need to because the moment you switch on the camera it is all pretty much either onscreen instructions or really self-explanatory – even the button to switch it on and off says power on it – you definitely can’t miss it! Starting up the camera and set-up – well you don’t actually have to do it, you can do it later on if you are in a desperate rush to get using your camera. To be honest all you set up is the time, date and which time zone you’re in. Clever thing that cameras they remember it unless you take the battery out – then the memory will forget it but to be honest it’s not difficult to change anyway. Considering on the back of the camera there is a menu button and it’s easy to change in the menu using the wheel around the menu button, and up, down, side to side to select your time and date options. Couldn’t be easier!

One of the better things about this camera is that you can literally use it right out of the box – but the memory or pictures if really quite low at only 20Mb, on the top setting I got very few photos at all, if I needed them – but I had already thought about it and got myself a 8Gb memory card anyways so didn’t need to use it – the camera will take up to a 32Gb memory card in you get a SDHC, which is essentially a high quality one, they are more expensive by a tiny amount – but on the normal SD you can only get 2Gb at the most for the camera so it’s worth extra not to have to keep emptying the camera all the time and have videos. Thankfully the camera doesn’t slow down as the memory card fills up as I have seen in some cameras as the videos mount up – they seem to clog cameras quite a lot – it takes a second or two to bring the full video up for playback, but it won’t take all day if you’re wanting to show someone. Similarly with photos the larger the size of them the longer they take to load, but it is still quite quick – and another good point of this camera is that regardless how many pictures and videos you have it will let you scroll through them really quickly. (By pressing the circular button with the side on triangle in it.) It does make using this camera really easy the majority of the time!

The quality of the images obviously depends on the user’s choice of megapixels, because you can go quite low to decrease the size of the pictures; you can take it as 1mp of photo which is really small and a very low file size, in increments all the way up to 12mp which will give you the best pictures. On top of this you can also make a decision of the level of fine on your photo, from normal up to superfine – this will also increase or decrease your file size. Which if anyone like me does ‘Shop and Scan’ taking photos of those damn receipts does mean having to drop it down to quite a low quality to even get them to take one picture at a time. So I was constantly finding myself changing the quality. That and when you transfer them over to your computer or laptop it can take an age if there are a lot of pictures or videos in that high quality. Quality of the videos basically stays in one level of quality and it really is good - though you can chose the high quality function which does take more memory, though you can’t actually zoom in because you will lose all your audio. I tend to only use my video function at gigs, and considering I always manage to get really close to the front I don’t need to use a zoom thankfully. The video quality really surprised me because it is so good even with really loud noises such as gigs – you can listen back and hear every word of the sons with no distortion; even with the video I took at new year in London where I recorded the fireworks it’s an easily watchable video with no distortion and you’re not going to blow your eardrums out watching it.