Samsung Pro815 Review

The Samsung Pro815 features a whopping 15x optical zoom (7.2 - 108mm, F2.2 - 4.6) Schneider-Kreuznach Varioplan lens, equivalent to 28 - 420mm on a 35mm camera. The lens, which is locked to 50 - 100mm equivalent in Super Macro mode, has rings on the barrel for zoom, manual focus and exposure compensation. The lens employs four low-dispersion glass elements to minimize chromatic aberration.

Other Pro815 features include a 2/3" sensor with a resolution of eight megapixels, 235,000 pixel color TFT LCD viewfinder, 3.5" 235,000 TFT LCD display, a unique third 115,000 pixel 1.44" wide status/preview LCD mounted on top, pop-up flash and hot shoe, and is powered from a 1900 mAh 7.4V Li-ion battery.

The Samsung Pro815 offers Auto, Program, Shutter Priority, Aperture Priority and Manual exposure modes, a range of 11 scene modes (Night, Portrait, Children, Landscape, Close-up, Text , Sunset, Dawn, Backlight, Fireworks, Beach & Snow), three metering modes (Multi, Center-weighted and Spot) and a 9-point autofocus system. ISO sensitivity ranges from 50 to 400.

Burst mode performance provided by the Pro815 is 2.5 frames-per-second at full resolution and up to 10fps at one megapixel. The Pro815 also has an interval timer mode (1-60 minutes, up to 99 frames) as well as a 2 or 10 second self timer. An optional wireless remote control (SRC-A1) is available.

The Pro815 supports Adobe RGB Color space, offers three JPEG compression levels as well as TIFF and non-compressed RAW formats. Storage media is CompactFlash Type I or Type II (up to 4GB guaranteed). The Samsung Pro815 is also capable of capturing movies at a number of resolutions and frame rates with stereo sound in AVI (Motion JPEG) format.

Software provided with the Samsung Pro815 includes Digimax Master, Digimax Reader and drivers for both Windows and Mac OS.