Samsung WB700

Korean Manufacturer Samsung is working hard to get a foothold in the camera market, and the WB700 compact is a creditable effort.

Your money buys a 14.2-megapixel camera with German Schneider-Kreuznach zoom optics. The lens is reasonably bright at 24mm and f/3.2, and deserves the mega-zoom moniker with an 18X reach.

Design-wise, the WB700 looks plain and a little old-fashioned compared to its competition, but feels solid and nice. The controls are logical and the menu system is easy to navigate.

Images from the WB700 are reasonably sharp and free from noise up until ISO 400. Above that, noise creeps in and ISO 1600 looks decidedly ugly.

Oddly enough, display specialist Samsung appears to have put a low resolution 230k-dot LCD on the WB700. Competing vendors provide at least twice the resolution, and it makes the WB700 feel dated. Not having full 1080 high-definition video adds to that feeling.

The biggest problem with the WB700 is that it performs slowly. Although it wakes up fast, and is ready to shoot almost immediately, taking a picture causes the LCD to blank out for almost a second while the camera processes the image and writes it to the storage; this even with a fast Lexar Pro 133x SDXC card in the WB700.

You get plenty of camera for your money with the Samsung WB700, but there are better choices out there.