The slick looking NV series from Samsung is now into its 2nd generation. Let's check out their top of the line model-the NV 20 compact camera

BUILD QUALITY: The NV 20 is a well built camera with a brushed aluminum exterior that comes in black and silver finishes. The 18 mm deep body houses all the electronics, with a retracted telescopic lens. A dial on the right corner allows choosing different shooting modes. To the left of this is the shutter button and a slightly smaller power button that is recessed into the body. The recessed power button restricts accidental button presses when the camera is in a trouser or a bag pocket. The rear panel of the camera has the zoom stick on the top right corner. This also has the huge 2.5-inch LCD screen with a row of unlabeled buttons along the right and bottom edge of the screen. The bottom right of the screen has an image preview button that can be used to view images and videos currently stored.
The unlabeled touch sensitive 'Smart touch' buttons gives it an eerie sci-fi look. When you turn the camera on, the UI elements align themselves to these buttons display labels for the U I icons when the corresponding button is touched. This makes for some interesting control mechanisms and Samsung has elaborately used these everywhere.

FEATURES: The camera features a huge array of image enhancement options with image effects, and in-camera editing cropping and resizing. The usual scene, video, auto, manual and program modes are also present.The scene mode has ample number of preset modes. Of the various scene modes, there is one business card mode that gets its own PC software to process its images. The business card reader application is supposed to read information from business cards that have been clicked on the camera. However the picture quality of the images in this mode is so low that nothing is recognized by the software for the most part.

PERFORMANCE: Sadly the aesthetic appeal of the camera does not trickle down to the quality of pictures that it clicks. The pictures have a lot of problems; most caused due to a lower quality sensor. The camera claims an output resolution of 12.1 megapixels which by any standards is too ambitious for a compact camera with a 1/1.72 inch sensor. The mega-pixel rating here is merely a number to lure customers into buying a camera that looks good but does not let its pictures look as good. We are not saying that the pictures are not big enough but all that extra image data does not translate to pictures that have the amount of detail given by 12MP cameras. The pictures have all sorts of errors cropping up in different ways. In a lot of pictures the reds are enhanced. In frames that have a lot of colors, the saturation levels peak really easily. We tried taking a few pictures of a normal outdoor scene in broad daylight at ISO 80. The shadows came out grainy and the leaves of most trees merged into one another, giving us a picture that looked alright on a 1024x768 screen but as soon as we zoomed in and saw the picture at the actual pixel size, all the details were lost.

VERDICT: The NV220 camera looks good and has an interesting control mechanism; image quality on the other hand is only good enough for group photos in swanky social dos. FOR, Looks good.

AGAINST: The interface is not very suitable for fast operation. The camera is also more expensive than others in its class.




Specifications
Dimensions (WxHxD): 96.5 x 60 x 18.6 mm;
Weight: 151.1g;
CCD: l/1.72-inch;
Resolution: 12 MP;
Focal Length: 34 -102 mm (35 mm film equivalent);
LCD: 2.5-inch color TFT;
Internal Memory: 18 MB;
External Memory: SDHC,
upto 8GB;
Scene Modes: 15;
Shooting Modes: 6