CNET Editors' review: Samsung SH100

Photo quality from the SH100 is good up to and including ISO 400. Like most sub-$200 pointand-shoots, it's not a camera you'd want to use in low-light conditions or indoors without a flash.

The photos get spectacularly worse above ISO 400, picking up a lot of color noise and losing detail. Actually, noise is a bit of a problem even at the SH100's lowest ISO sensitivities when photos are viewed at full size; if you need to enlarge and heavily crop your photos and still want to use them for large prints, I would skip the SH100. However, if you're considering this for its online-sharing capabilities and don't typically make prints larger than 8x10s or view images at large sizes onscreen, the SH100 is a safe choice for the money. It is because this camera is designed primarily for Web sharing that it earned a higher-than-usual photo-quality rating.

Colors produced by the SH100 were very good at and below ISO 400: bright, vivid, and pleasing.

The auto white balance is good, which is important since this camera really is all about automatic shooting. If you do want more say in the end result, in the Program mode you have access to manual white balance and custom RGB sliders as well as sharpness, saturation, and contrast sliders.

There's a slight amount of barrel distortion at the wide end of the lens and barely perceptible pincushioning with the lens extended. More importantly, the lens on my review camera was inconsistent with some softness off to the sides, particularly the left side. Center sharpness was OK, though.

Video quality is on par with a basic HD pocket video camera; good enough for Web use and casual TV viewing. Panning the camera will create judder that's typical of the video from most compact cameras and you will see ghosting with fast-moving subjects. The zoom lens does function while recording, though the audio cuts out slightly while the lens is moving. Image stabilization is digital only.