Overview
Samsung's smart cameras are a range, also including the larger WB2200F, that while a step down from the Galaxy Camera in terms of complexity still manage to cram in a great many features.
The concept is an interesting one â€" can you make a camera that does everything, capturing, editing and sharing, severing the link between a digital camera and a PC or smartphone, or will the inevitable compromises make the final result unworkable?
While it doesn't have quite the range of skills of its bigger brother, lacking manual, aperture- and shutter-priority modes, the WB1100F is no slouch either. Featuring a 1/2.3in CCD sensor that's eith er 16.2MP (according to the spec sheet), 16.4MP (according to the back of the camera) or 15.9MP (images are actually made up of 4608x3456 pixels), and a 35x zoom lens that's equivalent to 25-875mm in 35mm terms.
This optic has a maximum aperture that varies from f/3 at the wide end to f/5.9 at the long end. Along with 1080p video, Optical Image Stabilisation and wireless features, the WB1100F certainly seems on the surface to have plenty to recommend it.
The screen, which isn't touch sensitive, is a three-inch TFT LCD with 460,000 dots.
The WB1100F is going up against the likes of the Canon Powershot SX510 in the 35x zoom stakes, but the similarly priced Canon has fewer megapixels yet gains full manual control. More expensive and with a 30x optical zoom is the Panasonic TZ60 which ups the ante by adding an EVF, a couple more megapixels and raw file support â€" sadly missing from the Samsung.
Build quality and handling
This camera is not going to fit in your pocket, with its protrusive lens and a grip that's deep enough to get a proper hold of, but neither is it huge and ungainly. It's lighter than you'd expect from something with so much glass and electronics packed into it, and its controls are well placed for accessing with a finger or thumb while still keeping hold of the camera and using the live view screen to compose your images â€" there's no electronic viewfinder on this model.
Despite its plastic construction t he WB1100F feels well put together, its parts tightly connected and not prone to movement. A clip would be nice on the battery and SD card compartment's door, so it fastens when you close it rather than you having to move a switch â€" this method of closure can catch you out and leave the door hanging, but neither battery nor memory card are going to fall out easily.
The lens cap is nicely designed, the lens retracting just enough when the camera's switched off to allow it to clip on. Try and switch it on with the cap attached, though, and the camera will beep and nag you to remove it, before turning itself off. A little more patience on the camera's part would be nice here.
There are no controls on the left-hand side of the body â€" only an NFC logo p lus the micro USB data and charging port live there, with a release on the side of the flash and the mysterious Speed Control button on the left of the lens â€" but the right of the camera is not overburdened with buttons either. Samsung has taken a minimal approach, expecting you to dive into menus or use the dedicated Settings position on the mode dial to alter parameters. You can do most common things, such as setting macro mode or playing back images, without using the menu, however.
The Speed Control button is raised from the lens, and is positioned for the left thumb while you're cradling the camera in both hands. It allows you to alter the speed at which the zoom travels, with it speeding up noticeably when the button is pressed.
The menus are sensibly lai d out, although some options are not available in all modes, leading to a hurried switch from Auto to P (there's nothing less automated, like aperture priority or manual) in search of something. The menu for Auto mode is one page, while P mode's extends past three full pages.
Movie makers are well catered for, as there's a dedicated Movie mode on the dial. A press of the red record button on the back of the camera will start you recording in any other mode too.
Overall the camera feels responsive, and when turning on is ready to shoot almost as soon as an image appears on the live view screen. Menus come up promptly, and processing of the built-in Smart Filters doesn't take very long even on a full 16MP image.
Performance and verdict
A weekend spent testing the camera on a variety of moving and non-moving subjects threw up no issues with metering, exposure or colour balance â€" P mode allows exposure compensation for those tricky compositions â€" but did uncover the flaws in the autofocus system.
With no way of telling you if you're within the minimum focus distance, which is as far as three and a half metres at the long end of the zoom and in Normal AF mode, the camera sometimes won't focus, which is fair enough, but other times reported a false focus lock for an image that was clearly still blurred on the screen. Auto Macro mode, which is an option in P and seems to be on by default in Auto, solves the distance problem, but not the false positives.
When on the cusp of its minimum focus distance, the camera also reported a red rectangle for no focus lock for images that, on later inspection, were in focus. It may be, however, that the subject was simply within the depth of field created by a small sensor and a short focal length.
The OIS can hold the lens reasonably steady at full zoom, but still expect a bit of wandering around. Something solid to rest the camera on will help immensely here â€" holding the camera away from your body to compose via the screen is never the most stable position.
The lens doesn't seem inclined to flare, even when shooting toward the sun, and the blue skies of a summer's afternoon were captured in accurate colours without too much cyan.
Those summer days uncover another flaw in the WB1100F, however: its screen. Any degree of sunlight renders the image hard to see, and while changing it to the Bright setting from its default Auto helps, it does nothing to cut down on the reflections that blight the image or increase the poor viewing angle.
Turning the brightness up will eat into the battery life too. With the screen on Auto a battery that showed as fully charged (the indicator only has three divisions) was flashing red by mid-afternoon on a day out, after nearly 200 photos and a little light Wi-Fi.
Image quality
Images are fairly sharp across the frame, but achieve their peak level of detail in the centre, as is common. High contrast scenes don't exhibit much in the way of chromatic aberration, and while there is distortion from using the wide end of the lens, it's nicely controlled and nothing to get worked up about.
Colours direct from the camera seem a tiny bit flat, but with the built in editin g functions this is something that can be easily addressed. Alternatively, the file can be transferred to a smartphone for brightening up.
Inspecting an image at 100% reveals smoothing, and noise naturally begins to creep in at higher ISOs. There's almost none of the colour speckling in dark areas that you often see, rather the images take on a grainy quality that's less offensive to the eye but still serves to obliterate detail form ISO 800 and up to the 3200 maximum.
Setting the camera to ISO 3200 also drops the image resolution to three megapixels, anything higher vanishing from the menu. Drop back to a lower sensitivity setting, and the image size doesn't automatically go back up again â€" something that may catch people out.
Smart features
Establishing an NFC connection to launch the Samsung Smart Camera app on a smartphone (we used an Android model) takes a few seconds, and the remote viewfinder app connects easily. The view on the phone scr een seems to lag about a second behind the movements of the camera, but the + and - zoom buttons on-screen move the lens as you'd expect (albeit as a series of jerks rather than smoothly). Capturing a photo takes slightly longer using the app, as a tap of the on-screen shutter button triggers focusing, then takes the pic.
To transfer an image to a smartphone, you display it in the camera's playback mode, then bump the phone and camera together, letting NFC and Wi-Fi do their stuff. The file transfers in less than ten seconds, and appears in a Gallery folder called MobileLink (on Android) from where it can be edited or shared as if it were an image taken with the phone's camera.
Direct from the camera, you have fewer options. You can share to Facebook, Picasa, Dropbox or by email. Dropbox sharing asks you to input words from a captcha that doesn't appear â€" something that needs to be fixed â€" but the others seem to work just fine. Why no Flickr or Twitter, though?
Verdict
The camera that does everything is a lovely idea, and Samsung is well on the road to getting it right. This isn't it, though, as while it's great to see so many features packed into a relatively small camera body that's reasonably priced for what you get, the unreliable AF and lack of anything more complicated than P mode are a bit of a turnoff.
Battery life isn't amazing either, a victim of the limited space inside the camera body, but that body is nice to hold, balances well in the hand and isn't as massive as it could have been, given what's packed within.
Some of the features are great. Wi-Fi in cameras is becoming standard, but the ease with which the WB1100F establishes a link with its companion app through NFC marks it out from the crowd.
We liked
The size, handling and feature packed nature of the camera. The speed with which it connects to the companion app and the wireless features in general are great to work with, and the image quality really isn't bad, with its absence of colour noise.
We disliked
The AF system. Misses, false positives and a minimum focus distance that balloons to 3.5 metres as you zoom didn't endear it to us. The screen is also hard to see in sunlight, and the battery life could be better.
Final verdict
Samsung has done well cramming this many features into a camera body. It's not compact, but will fit in a bag or outside coat pocket, and the 35x zoom means you can easily frame your subject whether you're close by or not. Focus (and, really, watch out for the AF) and shoot, then either edit and share directly from the camera or transfer it to your smartphone. It's an attractive proposition, and one that will become a more solid reality in the near future, but we're not quite there yet.
Sample images
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The zoom's widest setting is the equivalent of 25mm.
At its longest, you're looking at an equivalent of over 800mm
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Digital zoom takes you two times closer.
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While this duckling has a sharp head, the motion blur on the rest of its body is a lesson in keeping your shutter speed up. OIS won't help you here.
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This image is nicely exposed despite the contr ast between the dark water and white foam.
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Macro mode can capture a great deal of detail, and blurs the background nicely too.
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At the longer focal lengths, even more background blur can be achieved.
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Sharpness is best in the centre, but extends to the edges of the frame.
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There's some chromatic aberration at the edges of this contrasty image, but it's only noticeable if you look for it.
Smart filters
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