For your digital fun and finesse

The Samsung MultiView MV800 is a compact and stylish digital camera with flip-out display that lets you easily compose and shoot from different angles.

The screen can rotate up to 180 degrees for low- and high-angle shots and self-portraits, and those “self-shots” are literally a snap with the extra shutter button at the back, just behind the flip-out display. 

The flip-out unit doubles as a stand too when you’re using the timer.

The MV800 boasts 16.15-megapixel resolution and 26-130mm focal length in 35mm photography. The 26mm wide-angle Schneider-Kreuznach lens is great for scenery, as I proved with a test run. My pictures of the sky came up deep blue and the trees were a bright and vivid green.

This is an easy camera to operate. It uses a three-inch touch screen and the Smart Touch 3.0 user-interface. With Smart Touch you can drag and scroll through menu options effortlessly and launch whatever feature you want with a single touch. 

You can even personalise the wallpaper with your favourite image.

For quick snaps, Smart Auto mode evaluates the lighting and automatically chooses a scene mode that suits it. 

The scene modes available include Portrait, Night Portrait, Backlight Portrait, Blue Sky and Natural Green.

You can also select a scene mode yourself from six choices – Text, Sunset, Dawn, Backlight and Beach & Snow.

And the MV800 is fun to use with its special shooting modes, magic frames and photo filters. It has one of the most popular shooting modes – Beauty Shot – which smoothes the face and makes the skin look fairer. The filters include Miniature, Vignetting, Sketch, Fish-eye and Retro. The Sketch filter makes your shots look like pencil sketches.

The magic frame options include the ones that impose your subject’s face on 12 background templates, including a magazine cover, a newspaper front page, a T-shirt, a classic TV screen and two types of billboards.

Another fun shooting mode is Funny Face, which provides several distortion options – give your subject a big nose, long nose or a crazily broad smile.

Among the other useful shooting modes is Picture in Picture Shot, which lets you insert one image into another. 

Intelligent Portrait takes three different pictures of the same scene at the same time. When you use this mode to snap a wide-angle shot of a friend, the camera will captures two other good angles and compositions in just one click.

If you flip the screen to take your own portrait, you can also use the Self-Shot mode for better quality.

The camera has a built-in Photo Editor for basic modifications and Storyboard Maker for creating photo collages.

Plus, you can take 720p HD video. There’s an HDMI mini-port for playing it back on a large LCD TV.

The camera is quite light at 121 grams and compact, just 18.3mm thick.

It’s in stores now for Bt10,990.

 

         Key specs

_ Image sensor: 16.15 MP CCD

_ Lens: 26-130 (in 35mm format) with F3.3-F5.9 5x Schneider-Kreuznach lens

_ Display: Three-inch touch-screen TFT LCD with 288,000 pixels

_ Shutter Speed: Auto: 1/8 - 1/2,000 seconds/Program: 1 - 1/2,000 seconds/

Night: 16 - 1/2,000 seconds /AEB, continuous: 1/4 - 1/2,000 seconds

_ ISO Equivalent: Auto /100/200/400/800/1,600/ 3,200

_ Dimension: 92.0x56.2x18.3mm

_ Weight: 121g (without battery and memory card)