Samsung Digimax V4 Review

The desired recording mode is selected from the Mode Dial on the back of the camera.

The EASY shooting mode turns the Digimax V4 into an automatic point-n-shoot camera. There's only two flash options; red-eye reduction or disabled and the menu (shown in next frame) has simplified image size choices and drive modes.

EASY mode options:

Size - Print (2272x1504 3:2 aspect), Memo (1120x840), E-Mail (544x408)
Shooting - Single, Continuous, AE Bracketing

Program AE mode, the camera selects both shutter speed and aperture automatically. There's a battery level icon, zoom lens gauge, the "99" indicates the number of pictures remaining. The "L" means Large image size, the icon below that indicates the quality level (Fine), and below that is the sharpness icon indicating Normal. The Flash mode is "A"uto, the green brackets in the center is the auto focus area and we have half-pressed the shutter to get an AF lock. Bottom left is the Single frame drive mode icon and on the bottom right is the time and date.

P/A/M/S mode options:

Size - 2272x1704, 2272x1504, 1120x840 or 544x408
Quality - TIFF, SuperFine, Fine or Normal
Metering - Multi or Spot
Shooting - Single, Continuous, AE Bracketing
ISO Speed - Auto or fixed at 100, 200, 400 equivalents
White Balance - Auto, Daylight, Cloudy, Fluorescent or Tungsten
Effect - Normal, B&W, sRGB, Sunset
Sharpness - Soft, Normal, Vivid

Manual mode, you set both the shutter speed and the aperture manually. The camera will display the shutter speed and aperture in green or red to indicate proper or over- or under-exposure with the current settings.

Shutter-priority AE, you select the desired shutter speed and the camera will select the best aperture setting automatically. Slower shutter speeds can give moving objects a motion-blur effect, faster speeds will "freeze" a moving object.

Aperture-priority AE, you select the desired aperture value and the camera will select the best shutter speed automatically. Small aperture numbers yield less depth of field (range of focus), large aperture numbers yield greater depth of field.

Press and hold the "+/-" exposure compensation button and use the 4-way controller to adjust the desired compensation factor from +2 to -2 in 0.5EV steps.

Press and hold the "MF" manual focus button and use the 4-way controls to adjust the focus distance. There is an onscreen distance gauge but the display does not enlarge so the ability to accurately focus is somewhat limited in this mode.

Movie mode records 288 x 208 motion video at 15fps with audio. Movie clips are saved as Windows AVI format video files. The optical zoom cannot be used during movie recording, you can preset it before recording starts. The length of these movies is limited only by the amount of available memory.

Movie mode options:

White Balance - Auto, Daylight, Cloudy, Fluorescent or Tungsten
Effect - Normal, B&W, sRGB, Sunset
Sharpness - Soft, Normal, Vivid

And finally, you can Record Audio. The length is limited to a maximum of two hours. The display here says we can record a total of 7 hours, 55 minutes and 24 seconds of audio - there is a 256MB SD card in this camera. Audio recordings are saved as Windows WAVE format files.