Samsung SDC-80 Digital Camera

By Tatyana Sinioukov
Samsung's SDC-80 digital camera ($229) is a fun, funky camera that has no ambition to be more than what it is, an entry-level gadget with appeal to young consumers. And I loved the SDC-80 for it.

There's a reason behind the camera's trendy, iMac'y design, which is billed by Samsung as "retro." The SDC-80 has an oval shape and comes in translucent colors named after the four seasons, summer (blue), spring (green), winter (milky white) and autumn (orange). The camera's design and colors potentially match several of Samsung's other products that are geared to college kids and teenagers, for instance, the under-$100 VR400G/P VCR, which comes in translucent green and purple, or the hip-hop Yepp MP3 player in orange and blue and even Samsung's recent microwaves, which are partially decked in translucent colors. It's no coincidence the box in which the SDC-80 came in pictured a bewildered kid peeking from behind the cameras, just as I have no trouble imagining how color-coordinated the camera, the MP3 player, the VCR and the microwave would look in the college dorm room of an iMac owner.

The camera is basic, yes, but with a few twists. The SDC-80 has a resolution of 1,024 x 768 XGA, so it's not appropriate for printing large, detailed images but will do for Web/e-mail use and smaller prints for hanging on the fridge. The SDC-80 has no internal memory; it comes with a 4MB SmartMedia card, which is not limiting (you can fit up to 40 images), since you can only take low-resolution photos anyway, in JPEG format. There are two quality settings, standard (1,024 x 768) and normal (640 x 480). Many features are automatic, such as focus, white balance adjustment and exposure, although the camera does have manual adjustments for brightness and exposure.

I found that a few twists make this camera interesting and raise it beyond entry level. One is a black-and-white mode. Another one is that you can zoom in on parts of the image and view six images at a time in playback mode. My favorite, however, is the multi-image mode. You can shoot continuously, three to six images, and also multiple images, in sets of four or nine (640 x 480 dpi only).

To test the camera, I took it with me on a trip to Las Vegas and to the Italian Market area in South Philadelphia. The quality of images was surprisingly good. I didn't expect much from the VGA-resolution pictures, but most of them came out crisp, with good detail in the background and, apart from some whites that looked too magenta, accurate colors. They even looked good when I printed them in 4 x 6 and 5 x 7 sizes on a Kodak Personal PictureMaker 200 with high-gloss Kodak Premium Picture paper.