Samsung NV24HD

Judging by some of the cameras we've seen recently, wider angle lenses could be the next big thing. Hello, I'm Richard Trenholm of CNET.co.uk, and this is the very wide angle Samsung NV24HD. All right, it's no fish-eye lens, but compared to most compact cameras you'll be able to get significantly more into your pictures. The width of the frame is is measured in millimetres with an equivalent focal length to a 35mm film camera. But all you really need to know is that the lower the number, the wider the frame. Most compacts clock in at 38mm, or 35. Some of the better compacts manage 28mm. The NV24, meanwhile, lives up to its name with 24mm. That's pretty much the widest compact on the market. So is this wide boy a one-width pony or is there as much crammed into the NV24 as into one of its pictures? It's a 10.2 megapixel snapper with optical image stabilisation, 3.6x optical zoom and face detection, which can pick out and focus on up to nine faces. You can choose from full automatic mode, a selection of scene modes and manual mode. It's not entirely manual, but it does make use of our our favourite thing about the Samsung NV series: the smart touch interface. This is an unusual control interface that involves having buttons along the side of the 2.5-inch screen. You choose a setting, say, the size of the image, by pressing one button, then use the other buttons to make your selection. It might sound complicated, but it's actually a very intuitive way of putting all the settings within two button-pushes. When shooting you will practically never have to wade through a single menu because it's all at your fingertips. But it doesn't stop there. The buttons are touch-sensitive, so they work with just the lightest brush of a finger. Going back to manual control for a second, this means that some options can be tweaked by sliding you finger back and forth. A really nice touch is that the icons on the sliding scale show what the effects of your changes will be: so on the shutter speed slider, the little man is crisp and sharp when you have a fast shutter setting, but as you make the shutter slower, the little man gets blurry. The effects are also previewed on screen, so a faster shutter speed makes everything go darker. As much as we love this clever interface, we're not keen on the zoom switch, which is a bit small. But overall we're big fans. I'm Richard Trenholm of CNET.co.uk, and this is the Samsung NV24HD.