Samsung Digimax i6 review revisited

After a couple of months of reg­u­lar use, I thought I should update my views on the Sam­sung Digimax i6. Warn­ing, I spent five years being a ser­i­ous pho­to­grapher shoot­ing 25000 frames of film with manual focus cam­eras, before calm­ing down and using a Canon G2 and later a Canon D300, for a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent pho­to­graphic tasks, no bands or low light work, instead a lot of print work that covered national magazines, news­pa­pers and 100 or so pub­lic­a­tions, includ­ing magazine cov­ers that came out of work in the past five years. As a res­ult of this I have pretty high stand­ards when it comes to cameras.

I decided I need an ultra com­pact cam­era to sup­ple­ment the G2. There are no cam­eras on the mar­ket with all the fea­tures I wanted, so I chose the small size of the i6 over the abil­ity to shoot RAW format and aper­ture pri­or­ity, because the cam­eras with those fea­tures were more than twice the weight of the i6 and I had those fea­tures in the G2. The addi­tional fea­tures of the i6 to shoot video, record audio, plays mp3s and video just made the choice easier.

With some excep­tions noted below I am happy with the out­put of the cam­era, if you want to see the res­ults your­self, all my pho­tos on flickr and videos on you­tube are shot using the Sam­sung Digimax i6.

Good points

1. Small size, fits in a pocket and can be taken any­where and almost always is.
2. Does not look like a real cam­era, this is a big advant­age and you can get far more can­did shots from people than you would get with a DSLR.
3. Robust, it has sur­vived two 1m+ fall to the floor.
4. In most cases no notice­able shut­ter lag, and in my opin­ion the lag far bet­ter than the G2 and as good as the D300. Note my defin­i­tion of shut­ter lag is the time between, after you have com­posed the shot and have a meter read­ing by slightly depress­ing the shut­ter release, fully depress­ing the shut­ter release and the time taken for the cam­era to respond. In true point and shoot use this may differ.
5. Reas­on­able bat­tery life, when tak­ing pho­tos and play­ing mp3s, just don’t use the flash.
6. Styl­ish good looks.

Bad Points

1. Film speed and qual­ity, this is not really a prob­lem, you just need to be aware of degrad­a­tion that hap­pens at the dif­fer­ent ISO levels. The image is 2x actu­ally size so you can see the dif­fer­ence from top to bot­tom between 50, 100, 200 and 400 ISO speeds. I was sur­prised by the dif­fer­ence from top to bot­tom, between 50 and 100. The 200 and par­tic­u­larly the 400 are far super­ior to the G2, though no where near the same qual­ity as the D300.
2. Because on the size, shape and lack of view­finder the i6 takes a lot of get­ting use to hold cor­rectly. Still prac­tice makes per­fect, in oth­ers words I am no longer tak­ing pho­tos that include my fin­gers and less likely to move the cam­era as I press the shut­ter release.
3. The flash is under­powered, power hungry and there is con­sid­er­able delay (5 seconds +) between tak­ing shots with the flash. But then again I find the same with almost every built-in cam­era flash, (except the length of delay) and why I pur­chased a ded­ic­ated external flash for the G2 a couple of months after buy­ing that cam­era. How­ever, I find the i6 flash to be very power hungry, res­ult­ing in the long delays to recharge and for all that trouble very inef­fect­ive except at really short range, less than 1.5m.
4. The AWB (auto­matic white bal­ance) does not seem to work well under low light nat­ural light con­di­tions (dawn, dusk and heavy shade) it gives everything a magenta hue. You need to set change your white bal­ance manu­ally in these conditions.
5. When shoot­ing video you lose sound, when you zoom in or out and a second or two after.
6. The advanced shake reduc­tion is post pro­cessing soft­ware and takes con­sid­er­able time . I pre­ferred to leave it turned off and take three or four shots in rapid suc­ces­sion and choose the best one and clean it up myself, rather than hope the one taken by the cam­era and it’ pro­cessing tricks is the best shot.
7. The tri­pod mount is an extra piece of plastic which I am almost guar­an­teed to break or lose in the next couple of years. Even with such a small cam­era, I reg­u­larly use a tripod.

Conclusion

To take great pho­tos you need a cam­era with you. That is the big advant­age of the i6, you can just stick it in your pocket then when the oppor­tun­ity arises pull it out of your pocket, hit the power but­ton (it powers up very quick) and be ready to take the shot. The i6 is not a replace­ment for a qual­ity com­pact cam­era for a ser­i­ous pho­to­grapher, it lacks fea­tures like a fast lens (f3.9 at the wide end), does not store pho­tos in uncom­pressed format, has lim­ited con­trols ie no aper­ture pri­or­ity or manual set­tings and no con­nec­tion for an external flash. But if you own a DSLR and do not enjoy lug­ging it with you every­where then the i6 is a handy take every­where altern­at­ive, the pho­tos are good for a cam­era of it’s size, they may not be the qual­ity you are use to but you will have the photo, unlike if you left you big cam­era at home and you can listen to music or watch videos while wait­ing for the light to be just right on the big photo shoots.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 3rd, 2006 at 3:18 pm and is filed under Just geek . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.