Introduction

The compact digital camera market is quite saturated at this point, with every electronic manufacturer trying their hand at it. But if Samsung as a brand is known for one thing, it’s innovation and their Galaxy smartphones are proof of that.

So it’s only fitting that their latest entry in the compact camera market – the WB150F – has some strikingly cool features that innovate within the segment. Their image quality and performance in itself is decent yet unremarkable, in the sense that it doesn’t outdo its competitors in any significant way. Where it does manage to really outdo the competitors is in terms of features taht are unheard of in the segment till now and will definitely appeal to the class that the camera is targeted to. The most notable one, you say? Here you go – built-in WiFi that allows you to upload images to social networks directly from the camera.

Features

Samsung has made sure they aren’t behind their competitors in terms of specs and have packed a 1/2.3-inch CCD sensor with a total of 14.2 megapixels — 4,320×3,240 pixels. It actually has a full manual mode for pictures with a shutter that reaches upto 16 seconds and ISO that can go upto 3200. Program, Aperture Priority and Shutter Priority modes also exist which is something you see on DSLR’s.

Zoom is something of an importance with cameras that don’t have interchangeable lenses, and Samsung has quite an insane amount of zoom with an impressive 18x zoom lens on the camera. Now theres’s optical image stabilization which does a good job with actually making sure those zoomed in images remain steady. Even the aperture is quite robust, with a f/3.2 zoomed all the way out and goes upto f/5.8 when in telephoto mode.

But the feature that makes this camera stand apart from the rest of the crowd is without a doubt it’s built-in WiFi capabilities. Once you’ve taken your pictures, the camera itself can connect to your work or home network after which you will be able to directly upload your images to Facebook, Picasa, YouTube and Photobucket as far as online services go. You can also e-mail the images as optimised versions, although we find the lack of Twitter as a service surprising.

Two other cool features are MobileLink and remote Viewfinder. MobileLink allows you to transfer images to your Android smartphone, but it’s currently limited to only Samsung Galaxy devices although this will probably change later on. A cool feature is the ability to use the Samsung Galaxy phone as a remote viewfinder for the camera itself and I imagine there can be a lot of practical uses for this if it isn’t a chore to get to work.

Special mention has to be given to the creative filters that this camera packs, which is a new thing that cameras like to do for the casual users and Samsung kicks it up a notch with a wide selection. There’s stuff like Sketch, Oil Painting, Cartoon, Retro, Palette Effects, Miniature, Magic Frame and so on which are not only live-previewed but actually manage to look quite decent if not tacky. But props for Samsung to actually give users so many presets to play with and I imagine kids will have a lot of fun with this.