Why you can trust TechRadar We spend hours testing every product or service we review, so you can be sure you’re buying the best. Find out more about how we test.
The sensor and processor are both very sympathetic to colours. They record and process themrealistically with just the right amount of saturation. Pictures are generally sharp, thanks in part to the nifty focusing, though edge definition degrades at mid to high sensitivity settings.
Noise is held nicely at bay at the lower end settings, but not surprisingly, it gets gradually worse as the sensitvity level goes up.
With other Samsung digital compact cameras such as the SH100 or ST6500, noise has a tendency to get visibly annoying at ISO 800, but the WB700 has an extra stop grace and only shows colour invasion at ISO1600 and ISO3200. At ISO 3200 images show a poor edge definition, as well as large blobs of colour noise. Darker areas of photographs taken at this setting also have a definite colour cast to them.
Though the metering system generally perfoms well, when the W700 is presented with complex lighting situations, we found that we had to underexpose by as much as 2/3rds of a stop.
That being said, we really like the pictures that we got from the Samsung WB700 digital compact camera. We think that the pros far outweigh the cons, and the majority of cons can be worked around.
We used a few of the digital filter effects in the test and the majority of them were great. We especially enjoyed using the old film filters at a Victorian boating lake. However, the miniature effect is disappointing. It works by placing a blur at the top and bottom of the picture that fades out to create an illusion of narrow depth of field. However, the edges of the blur are too hard on the WB700 filter and the result isn't especially effective in many cases.
Our test of the Samsung WB700 is on the way, but in the mean time we would like to share the resolution chart images and the noise and dynamic range results.
