Samsung NV15

Just like its predecessor, the NV15 is slim enough (97 x 60 x 19 mm) to fit into any pocket with ease. It’s a bit on the heavier side because of its all-metal body, but that’s not really worth your concern.

It may be slim, but Samsung’s worked a little handgrip into the design, which goes a long way in offering a good and comfortable grip.

The most attractive thing about the design is a touch-sensitive button array system that makes navigation a breeze. In case you didn’t know, the buttons are located to the right at the bottom of the screen, and their function changes according to the indicators on the screen. It may feel a bit tricky at first, but after a minute you’ll appreciate its simplicity over a regular camera navigation system.

The camera is built for the casual point-and-shoot audience. It does feature a half-baked manual mode, but the limited options and lack of manual focus make it a pointless feature. Not that it’s necessarily a bad thing – the NV15 has a well-defined audience and the features cater perfectly to it.

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The NV15 has a standard set of shooting modes, but as far as I could tell, most of them are quite adaptive in case you forget to switch the scene mode after clicking the desired shot. It’s not advisable, but it still shows how little the camera restricts a casual shooter.

Besides the regular feature set, the NV15 also has an Effect mode. Here you have access to fun stuff like funny frames, image compositing, and the option to shoot multiple pictures and turn them into an animated GIF file from the camera itself. As juvenile as it may sound, this feature was actually the most appreciated feature when I showed the camera to any of my friends.

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Even the post-processing options in the camera are impressive. You have the usual options to crop and resize images, you can change the color tone to black and white, sepia, negative, red, green, etc. along with an option to remove red eyes. As good as these may be, I wish there was an option to correct the exposure of the images in the editing options. That would have made the package complete.

In our performance tests, the Samsung NV15 scored pretty well overall. It took just a little over a second to start up and the same time to power off. Shot-to-shot time gap without flash was around two seconds. These timings make the camera pretty fast when compared to others in its category.

Colors seemed a bit saturated, but that’s expected from a camera aimed at mainstream consumers. Expect your pictures to look ‘happy’.

The sharpness levels were great even with the kind of detail captured in landscape shots.

Though shooting at sensitivity levels higher than ISO 400 would be inadvisable, the camera does perform very well in its Night Landscape scene mode. As you can see below, it has done a pretty decent job of making the most of available light without showing much digital grain.

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Overall the NV15 makes a great family/vacation camera at Rs 17,990 (street price with bill and warranty). Its small, easy to use, packed with fun features, and gives great results. So long as you don’t expect any manual functionality, you’ll be more than happy. Highly recommended!