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Gear65 #8 - Samsung WB500
3 years ago on 13 February, 2009

This week we invite our photographer friend Willy Foo to talk about Samsung’s top of the line point and shoot camera, the Samsung WB500, discussing it’s features as well as Willy’s experience of using the camera at the Jurong Bird Park. I must add that we’re quite impressed with this S$599 camera!

Read on for some sample photos and videos taken with the Samsung WB500<



This was a video taken using the WB500 in 720p HD.

Check out some photos taken using the camera on our Flickr page.

Check out Willy’s photos to the bird park using the WB500 on his facebook page.

I still have the camera with me for a few days more (Until 17th Feb 2009). In the meantime, if you wish to have a certain shot taken or video filmed to find out if this camera is for you, let me know. Send me an email to daniel at Tech65 dot org, or just leave a comment here.

By the way, the three photos of my living room in the Flickr set are taken by request from Regi by email as he wishes to find out how this camera performs for interior photos: INDOOR, maybe in poor light condition; is 24mm wide enough to capture the “complete” room and is the flash powerful enough.

Enjoy!

Tags: camera, samsung, wb500, willy foo
  • http://www.friedbeef.com Friedbeef

    Very nice, I’d really like to see more high ISO shots… tho before I make a purchase – I’ve been eyeing this cam for a long time!

  • http://www.friedbeef.com Friedbeef

    I saw a few shots you took with the fruits and spinning, but it really doesn’t look too encouraging at the moment – just hoping to get a larger sample of photos before I write off the high ISO performance :)

  • http://www.tech65.org/ Daniel

    If you’re a professional photographer, then you shouldn’t be looking at my photos, but Willy’s. I’ll be putting them up as soon as possible.

  • Unnamed

    Hi, thank you for the review. Your reviews goes more into details than other reviews on the net.
    According to your review I’ve now bought a WB500 !

  • http://www.tech65.org/ Daniel

    Wow, your welcome! Glad we could help. Credit goes to Willy this time though! Hope you enjoy the camera!

  • Annie

    Hi Daniel,

    I have being trying to view the photo samplers u mentioned that Willy took on the Bird park but i can’t find it..

    Rgds
    annie

  • http://www.tech65.org/ Daniel

    Hi Annie, it appears that the facebook link has expired (Facebook has a tendancy to do that… :S) I’ll email some photos to you!

  • http://blog.culturefight.com gan

    hey dude that’s a pretty good review you had made! bravo!

    I went to a harvey norman just a while ago and checked out this cam for my friend, liked the 24mm wide angle, as a DSLR hobbyist this is pretty much the P&S i’ld buy because I digs wide angle. but my previous experience with a ProSumer grade DC like this wasn’t pleasant, it focuses slow, and react real slow. so im wondering shall i suggest my friend to skip a prosumer like this one and straight away get a beginner range DSLR like D60 or a 450D.

    do you have an uncrop image so we can see it’s sharpness? also a test shot @ iso32oo so we can see how bad the noise is? do your photog friend think it focuses fast enough? and is there any shutter lag?

    Thanks bro!

    • http://www.tech65.org/ Daniel

      Hey there!
      Thanks for your good words about the review. Credit goes to Willy though.

      It’s actually been awhile since I used the camera so I can’t remember how fast the focus was. However, I don’t remember it being slow to focus, so that probably means it wasn’t slow enough for me to notice that. My personal camera does focus quite slowly, in a sense that if I zoom in too fast (and it’s not a DSLR kinda lens, so I’m not talking about 1X to 10X in a second kinda fast), the camera focus always has trouble catching up with the zooming in, thus the subject will always be blur if I zoom in fast, and it will take a while to focus. If that’s what you mean by slow focus, then I don’t recall the WB500 as being slow.

      I just uploaded an untouched photo file I took when I was reviewing the camera, so it might help you with what you’re looking out for.

      http://www.tech65.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/sdc101271.jpg

      Willy is quite a busy guy (he’s the boss of one of the best photography companies around) so I don’t think I’ll be able to get an answer from him for those questions. Sorry about that. I’ll take note of these factors the next time we get another camera.

      Also, technology moves so far nowadays, that Samsung already released an improved version of this camera known as the WB550. You can read the press here:

      http://www.samsungcamera.com/press/press_news_view.asp?ynews_uid=201

      So you might wanna consider waiting for this camera.

      Hope this helps!

    • http://willyfoo.com Willy Foo

      Hi everyone,
      The album for the pics taken at bird park should be available from
      http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=102658&id=719891275&l=acc59de542

      Gan,
      I recall that the focusing is quite fast even if fairly dim light.
      Don’t bank on ISO3200 though.. each camera’s top ISO will usually be noisy, but they put it there so that you have the option of getting the shot (eg. sports photography where freezing the action is more important than noise).

      But ISO800 is very clean.. I can’t recall what the performance of ISO1600 was though..

      What I do hope to see is camera manufacturers being able to provide a low MP version of the cameras and trade that for High ISO… having cleaner High ISO performance is a lot more important to me than MP. Putting too many Megapixels into the CCD just increases noise.

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Daniel
Daniel Tsou is our fabulous host, who decides mostly what we talk about and basically calls the shots, Yes, he does. I, writer of this bio on Mr Tsou is very much afraid that by commiting this post to words, I will be dragged off in the night by a black Truck, or a Segway more like. Other than that, Daniel is tall, lived for a period of time in Venezuela and Spain, and is enthusiastic for all things tech.
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