Samsung i8 review

Samsung i8 Review

Reviewed by: Rich Trenholm

Reviewed on: 9 September 2008

The MP3 player has all the basic functions: shuffle, repeat, skip, remembering the last played track and so on. There are also a number of equaliser settings for different genres of music. You can skin the player with one of your photos, which is pretty neat.

We admit we wanted the tour-guide function to be full of dodgy translations, but it isn't actually bad. It's fairly lightweight -- the entry for Portobello Road is just a jokey reference to the film Notting Hill -- and the lack of maps mean it's no substitute for an actual guidebook. But as a quick introduction to the major sights of a particular destination it hits the spot.

The PMP function plays Xvid MPEG-4, with bundled software to convert other formats. A fast-forward option going up to 32x is included, while it also remembers where you were in a video.

Performance
Start-up is rather slow because you have to push and hold the power button -- not great for snapshots. Flash recycle time also felt slow to us.

Another convergence bugbear is battery life. As a camera, the i8's battery is fine: we didn't have to recharge the camera while taking test shots. But when we mixed in use of the MP3 player and other functions we noticed the battery dropping faster. The battery will last long enough to watch a feature film, but we do suggest topping up the charge at every opportunity if you're going to use the multimedia functions heavily.

Although it is possible to watch whole films, this reviewer couldn't face an entire feature staring at the screen. Although it does a clever job of automatically adjusting to lighting conditions, the picture isn't great, with motion causing blur and diagonal lines rendering horribly jagged.

Image quality is respectable at low ISO levels, but noise is more of an issue than it should be, even as low as ISO 100. The maximum ISO 3,200 is only available at 3-megapixel resolution and should be avoided like the plague.

This crop shows the gritty texture, purple fringing and loss of resolution with ISO 3,200

There's some purple fringing in evidence in high-contrast shots and around some colour boundaries. This is especially true in higher-ISO shots. Apart from that, images were untroubled by vignetting or distortion. In fact, our biggest problem with ruined shots was fingers creeping in because of the positioning of the lens at the top left.

Conclusion
The traditional objection to convergence devices is that the extras aren't as good as a separate device. If you're happy to take that as a given, the Samsung i8's extras do the job well enough for you to keep your pockets light, but they won't replace separate, high-end PMPs or MP3 players.

We'd like to be charmed by this cheeky snapper, but the plasticky build makes it less exciting than the sturdy and stylish i70, while the uninspiring camera function isn't a patch on comparable point-and-shoots such as the slender Casio Exilim EX-S10.

Edited by Marian Smith