In its stylish NV series, Samsung unveils a new addition, the NV15.  Equipped with 10.1 million pixels, it’s presented as a very fine camera with sensitivity up to 3200 ISO, simple and practical navigation, and face detection.

Handling

There is no change in shape compared to others in the same family.  The NV15 has a solid metal body and sober and clean design.  On the back, there is a touch sensitive interface via two rows of attractive buttons.


In use, controls are quite practical but this is more a question of taste.  You will either like it or not.  The exposure dial allows access to the camera’s manual mode and the zoom ring is quite useful despite its very small size.  The LCD screen is of good quality and display is very fluid in all lighting conditions.  There were however some odd “streaks” (afterglow) in fast movements.  The NV15 has rather good overall speed except in burst mode with a disappointing less than one photo per second.  Finally, the NV15 doesn’t have a wide angle (34 mm) which is really unfortunate for a camera in this category.

Quality of images

The lens which is combined with a 10 megapixel sensor produces rather well detailed and uniform images.  You can see the fine level of detail in 20 x 30 photos.   As for noise, a rather thorny issue for this brand, the NV15 is pleasantly surprising.  Grain is certainly visible at 100 ISO but it is rather well controlled up until 400 ISO in addition to well balanced smoothing up until 800 ISO.  Beyond this, noise control is brutally abrupt and there is a significant loss of detail.  There are also purple fringes on contrasted subjects that are quite noticeable.  Furthermore, we found it really unfortunate that there is no optical stabilization which means rapidly climbing into higher sensitivities. 

There are rather good neutral colors and white balance is correct while electronic stabilization doesn’t prove to be too efficient and considerably slows the camera down.  Video quality is satisfactory although it’s not exceptional.  The same goes for the macro mode (4 cm).  Finally, the flash lacks a bit of strength but produces good results on closer subjects.