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The Samsung WB600's image quality is excellent.
Our tests suggest it could stand to be a touch sharper, as cropping in revealed a merely average amount of detail resolved, but the vast majority of photographers will find nothing to complain about.
In particular, the WB600 rescues itself from this minor criticism by rendering colours beautifully, edges sharply, and - impressively for such a long lens - taking images with very little chromatic aberration.
A more serious criticism comes when the lens is extended all the way to 360mm. Detail resolution in the middle of the frame remained good, but the edges lost sharpness almost entirely.
In fairness, it's a problem you'll only really notice if critical details are in the corners of your compositions, but it's worth watching out for.
Low light performance is reasonable. The WB600 offers ISO settings from 80 to 3200, although as is the case with most compacts sporting such ambitious sensitivities, the highest settings are best ignored unless your subject truly transcends image quality.
Dull colours and an obscuring fog of digital noise means ISO 3200 is best saved for emergencies or, even better, not used at all. You have to reach a fair way down the scale to find ISO settings truly unaffected by noise, although ISO 800 is just about usable if you want to avoid using the flash.
For wildlife and sports photographers looking to make the most of the long lens, the WB600 includes a motion capture mode, which in our tests took 30 frames in just 4.7 seconds - an average speed of 6.4fps.
That's significantly quicker than the burst modes on low-end DSLRs, but the speed comes at a price, as image resolution is reduced to just 0.3 megapixels, or VGA. If you want to take pictures at the WB600's native resolution of 4,000 x 3,000, you'll need to live with the considerably slower burst speed of around 1fps.
