Review: Samsung F70

The Samsung F70 is a powerful camcorder, despite its small size. The switch to a CMOS-based sensor means it delivers bright images, even if they are somewhat saturated.

The F70 is roughly the size of a hand palm and weighs about 220g. This makes for easy handling and mobility. At a push, you can even cram this little camcorder into your handbag, if you want to film your mates out on the town.

The F70 has a black metallic finish, with rounded edges. I found it sat comfortably in my hand. There is also an adjustable strap to keep the camcorder safely gripped. Unfortunately, the F70 is not left-hand friendly.

The display opens to the left with ports and SD card slots on the right of the display. This compact design means all the slots and most of the buttons are tucked away when the display is closed.

The F70 comes with a number of images to help novice moviemakers along. These include face detection and image stabilisation. I found the image stabilisation feature particularly useful when panning the camera along scenery. At the same time, face detection along with auto-focus allow even the most novice of users, like myself, to capture great footage of friends and family.

The F70's primary selling feature is the switch to a CMOS sensor. This has been popular in high-end video and digital film cameras for several years, and it's nice to see it finally filtering down to the everyday user.

Old CCD-based cameras had to split all light coming through the lens into three different colour channels via a prism. This limited the potential light sensitivity of the sensor, and as a result, the brightness of the image. It also hampered the potential colour saturation and sharpness. CMOS sensors have a thin film over the sensor, which performs the same function, but without cutting into the light and colour as much, resulting in more vivid images, for far less money and in a more compact body.

Unfortunately, one major shortfall of most CMOS sensors is what is called the "rolling shutter” effect. This results from the way the sensor saves each frame from top to bottom, line by line. The effect is a minor delay between the top and bottom of the frame during any sort of rapid motion.

While the camera comes with digital image stabilisation to help eliminate hand-shake and shudder, the rolling shutter aspect doesn't like fast motion. I found that scrolling the camera fast made people and buildings look like they're made from jelly because vertical lines "wobbled" with even the smallest of camera jerks. Cars zipping past also tend to look stretched out.

Video mode is limited to 1280 x 720 pixels, so roughly 0.9MP. This is fine for viewing on most computers, laptops and the smaller digital TVs. However, if the footage is displayed on a big-screen HDTV, it will not deliver the sharpness of the latest 1920 x 1080 Blu-ray. Still, for a camera that's roughly the size of your palm and lighter than a can of cool drink, it is leaps and bounds ahead of old pal camcorder in terms of quality, sharpness and colour.

One of the drawbacks of the CMOS sensor is that colours tend to be very saturated, with intense reds, greens and blues. This is great for the bush and kids' parties, but users hoping for something more natural, muted or romantic may be disappointed. A lot of people like intense and vivid colours, though my preference is the opposite (more natural look).

The sensor design has some extra features that are quite attractive. The lens itself is already quite impressive with its 52x optical zoom. This is boosted by what Samsung has dubbed the 'Intelli-zoom' function, which uses extra pixels on the sensor to help sharpen the image once the 52x zoom limit has been reached. Normally, with digital zooms, once this limit is reached, the image progressively loses quality and you digitally punch in past that mark.

The Intelli-zoom allows one to zoom without noticeable quality loss to the equivalent of a 65x zoom lens. One can also zoom digitally up to the 130x zoom mark, but with quite a distinct loss of resolution and clarity.

The F70 comes with a USB cable and power adapter to charge the battery. It takes standard SD cards, but none are included with the camera. According to Samsung, the battery should deliver 100 minutes of recording time, which is more than adequate for weekends away.

For its price and size, the Samsung F70 is a great buy. The camcorder offers sharpness and colour and is easy to use.