Pros & Cons of this 3 in 1

Author's Rating:

Pros: great 3 in 1 quality

Cons: doesn't function well as a digital camera or as a web camera

The Bottom Line: 
as a camera it is incapable, the pictures resolution vary according to environment.

Author's Review
I purchased the Samsung Digimax 35mp3 camera last summer, and have taken well over 800 pictures with it. It is an amazing work of technology, which enables one to both take pictures and enjoy listening to the latest music at the same time. Its small size enables it to look perfect as an mp3 player and camera.

The commands for the camera are pretty basic. If it contains mp3’s then it opens on mp3 player, hold down the mode button for 2 seconds and it changes to digital camera.

The digital camera can take pictures in 2 formats, high resolution and low resolution. On the standard 8MB disk you receive with the camera you can store 100 high resolution pictures, or 300 low resolution ones. You can delete the last picture or delete all pictures taken on the disk.

The mp3 player has 5 main functions, play and stop, volume control, track selection and track deletion. You flip through them by pressing the mode button, then use them with the play and stop buttons, to delete a track you press and hold the shutter button.

For the year that I have used this product I have uncovered various glitches in it. For instance, it consumes batteries at an absurd rate, both as an mp3 player and a digital camera. This seems to be a problem with all Samsung digital cameras.

As a digital camera, the flash never works properly, you can set it to automatic or manual, depending on the lighting, however automatic never works when you want it to, leading to dark pictures. There is a delay by the time you press the button and by the time the picture is actually taken. One has to squeeze and not push the shutter, this leads to shaking of hands causing the picture to come out hazy.

As a web camera, its 30 frames per second is pretty incapable. There is a large lag between when you actually move and when the movement is recorded.

The mp3 player has only 2 major inconveniences. The first, and toughest, one is that it takes an absolute eternity to upload the mp3’s onto the camera’s disk. The second, you have to delete mp3’s one by one, which is excruciatingly boring if you have a 256MB card with well over 50 mp3’s and would like to put a new selection on.

Overall, for a camera, it is not as good as it should be. However the 3 in 1 function saves you the trouble of having to buy a separate mp3 player and digital camera.