Product Review - Samsung S860 Digital Camera

Many smart photographers have told me the best camera is the one you have with you. Since you can take a Samsung S860 just about anywhere, that means it'll wear the "best" title by default. And that's pretty much the only way it could.

That's not to say it's a bad camera. It's inexpensive at around $63, it take common SD cards and it features a 3X optical zoom. But it's hamstrung by several liabilities that keep it from excelling.

First is its very nature: It's a compact digital camera. Even with an 8.1-megapixel sensor, it is never going to capture the rich colors and sharp lines of a single-lens reflex (SLR) camera. Its imaging sensor is just too small to compete with even entry-level SLRs.

Second, it's not the easiest camera to use. The user interface is hardly intuitive, and many of its options and settings are buried in digital menus on the rear LCD screen. If you think like a photographer, this will frustrate you. Programmers for a certain large software firm may feel right at home, though. This made it hard for me to use manual modes to alter shutter speeds and ISO settings for getting exactly the right shot. So I decided to be conservative and leave it on AUTO.

Finally, it's not the most reliably camera. When the camera powers up, its lens telescopes out of its body. To turn off, it retreats back inward. Any tiny bit of debris can hamper its ability to power up or shut down - a bit of dust was enough to cause me some trouble as I was learning to use it. Months later, I was perched on a glacier using a Leatherman tool to scrape a mysterious substance of the side of the lens body. I was able to clear enough of it to cajole the camera to power down.

Despite these three pratfalls, I have a hard time disliking the S860. It was there for me under circumstances in which I didn't want to risk the life of my Pentax K100D Super SLR. It managed a few decent photos and some video clips. Will I hang any of those in a 20 X 24 frame? No, but they're good enough to print in a smaller size, e-mail to friends and conjure memories of some great adventures. And that makes it a pretty darn good camera.