Performance
With a lagging shutter and long shot-to-shot time, the L74 Wide's performance seriously disappoints. The camera takes an arduous 4.4 seconds to start up and capture its first image, and can only fire off a single shot every 2.8 seconds after that.
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)
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Typical shot-to-shot time |
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Time to first shot |
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Shutter lag (typical) |
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)
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Typical continuous-shooting speed |
With the onboard flash enabled, that shot-to-shot wait balloons into 4.2 seconds. The shutter lagged a painful 0.9 seconds with our high-contrast subject and an otherwise respectable 1.1 seconds with our low-contrast target. Burst mode shot quickly enough, snapping nine photos in 6.4 seconds for a rate of 1.4 frames per second.
Photos taken on the L74 Wide range from mediocre to terrible, sporting some of the worst noise we've seen in recent months. Noise filled a majority of our shots, appearing heavily at levels as low as ISO 200. The noise appears as a muddled, fuzzy grain at low levels, but at ISO 800 and 1,600 it becomes a maelstrom of blurry static. Besides the massive amount of noise, the L74 Wide's photos also suffered from heavy fringing. A fuzzy pink appeared around almost every high-contrast edge (white flowers against green leaves, grey bricks against blue sky).
Despite the fringing and noise, the camera's photos have one redeeming feature: they aren't very distorted. With both wide-angle and high-zoom lenses, we often see distortion on at least one end of the zoom range. The L74 Wide's lens barely distorted zoomed shots and wide-angle shots suffered from only modest barrel distortion.
Conclusion
Although its wide lens and World Tour Guide are very useful features, the Samsung L74 Wide, available for around £160, simply has too many flaws to ignore. An irritating touchscreen interface, painfully slow performance and noise-filled photos make this a camera we simply can't recommend.
Additional editing by Jon Squire
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