Samsung WB850F SMART Compact Digital Camera - Black (16.2MP, 21x Optical Zoom) 3.0 inch LCD

The Samsung WB850F compact camera has enough resolution to shoot an advertisement for a billboard, zooms from ultra-wide to beyond-sports and enables you to upload your pictures to Facebook whenever you are near WiFi. However, the controls are unintuitive, shooting is sluggish, and support for the Mac is non-existent, despite the fact that Samsung has built in exemplary support for its competitor the iPhone. Although the video picture quality is superb, the audio cannot be extended with an additional microphone, meaning that you can't use it for serious filming. Overall, the features are impressive in a device this small and convenient, but don't imagine that you can ditch the dSLR if you need to capture important pictures.

The good:
16 Megapixels is more than the 12MP needed to shoot a billboard advertisement. The eye takes in about 6 megapixels, so this camera leaves plenty of room for cropping and oversampling. The Schneider lens is excellent quality for its size, as you would expect, and the pictures don't disappoint for resolution as long as you don't expect too much.

WiFi integration is excellent. Having set up a Sony wifi enabled Blu Ray player and this camera on the same day, I can say this was infinitely easier and worked perfectly right away. Uploading to Facebook was a snap, and the camera understands what resolution Facebook wants without having to fiddle with the settings.

The range of features is impressive, from auto-panorama to HD video and from a full range of flash functions including slow flash to automatic scene detection, this camera has got almost everything you could want, including built in GPS and image stabilisation.

The bad:
Although the resolution is fantastic and the optical zoom lens is extraordinary, the colour rendering tends towards oversaturation. What's more, the camera only offers JPEG, not RAW, so the choices that the camera makes about colour are baked in. Though you can improve things to some extent in Photoshop, you don't get the range of photographic control that even advanced amateurs would expect.

Although the WB850F supports remote shooting and picture control on an iPhone, you can't set the camera up on a Mac, which means that you won't be able to upload the maps that it needs for some of its key geotagging features. Naturally you can still pull the pictures onto your Mac, but in the modern world the lack of support is disappointing.

The manual is fine, if a little cryptic, but it's only available on CD-ROM, which disappoints.

By far the most disappointing feature -- which is typical of compact digital cameras -- is the control set. Setting manual exposure and aperture requires several menu operations. What's rather worse is that you can make settings on the manual functions -- such as changing the JPEG quality -- which then override the SMART scene settings and which you can't change back without going back to manual. Therefore, if you're wondering why your pictures are blotchy and you can't fix it, it's probably that someone has set JPEG to 'Normal' rather than 'Superfine' while playing with the manual settings.

Equally, when you come to actually take a shot, there is a noticeable time lag between you pressing the shutter and it taking a picture. You can shoot ten frames a second, but you can't get that one single shot if it's time dependent.

Finally, with no connectors for external flash or microphone, you are limited to the onboard equipment which makes flash fairly useless for anything but fill-in and means that the audio you record (even with 'zoom' microphone) is largely the audio around the camera, not anything to do with what you are seeing through that amazing zoom.

On balance
As long as you don't mind that this is actually a fairly ugly device, with an entirely non-functional knurled ring around the lens, the WB850F is a camera that fits a little bulkily into a jacket pocket, easily into a coat pocket, and nicely into a handbag, briefcase or glove compartment, and will shoot 85% of the pictures you ever want to shoot. Its feature-richness would indicate that it could do more, but the shutter lag and difficult controls mean that it is only somewhat better than good cameras in this category, rather than blowing them away. Still, for its size and convenience, this is unlikely to disappoint except when you want it to do the things that only a digital SLR can do.

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Key facts
The maximum aperture is f/2.8 -- as wide as the best Nikon zoom lens on a dSLR. At full zoom its a rather less impressive f/5.9, but that zoom is the equivalent of almost 500mm, which would require an enormous conventional lens or a fairly bulky mirror lens on a dSLR. The maximum ISO is 3200. It's pretty grainy at that point, but 3200 is as far as the best dSLRs took you just five years ago. 3200 will allow you to get a shot in an averagely illuminated room without having to rely on the ugly effects of on-camera flash.

WB850F Firmware Upgrade for improved Battery Life

The Samsung WB850F Smart Camera battery life issue can be fixed with a simple firmware update.
Please download the latest firmware version from Samsung website[...]
1. Search WB850F and click Drivers & Software menu.
2. Click Firmware menu on the left hand side.
3. Download the latest firmware and install on your WB850F.

[WB850F] Firmware Upgrade guide
1. Before upgrading the firmware

- Make sure you use fully charged batteries.If camera malfunction is caused during a firmware upgrade for the reasons given above, the main board may have to be serviced by a Samsung service center, which may result in major repair charges.
- Before upgrading the firmware, make sure that you format the SD card on your PC or camera and then download the necessary firmware file.
- Download the firmware file into the root directory of the SD card.
- Do not operate the camera, remove the batteries, or cut the power while upgrading firmware. Operate the camera only after the firmware upgrade is complete.

2. How to upgrade firmware?

1) Download the firmware file into the root directory of the SD card root folder.
2) Insert the SD card on which the firmware file is to be saved.
3) Turn on the camera. The version of firmware to upgrade will be displayed on the LCD screen. When you press the shutter button, the firmware upgrade will start. After upgrading firmware camera turned off automatically.
Please be careful GPS firmware will start again. Do not remove SD card.
4) Turn on the camera again, then GPS firmware will start automatically. After finishing upgrade GPS firmware camera will turned off automatically.
¦ If the firmware upgrade is not completed successfully or you need further detailed information or you experience difficulty in upgrading firmware, then do not proceed with the process on your own and visit a Samsung service center nearby.

Having owned a Samsung WB650 compact camera for a couple of years and having been reasonably happy with it, when the new WB850F was introduced I thought that it would be an improvement on the previous model.
I have now owned a WB850F for eight weeks.

My needs:-
A travel zoom with a GPS tagging feature.
Basically I want a camera that is small so that I always have it with me when out of the house.
I want a good zoom lens and a decent quality image.
In my opinion the WB850F is not for the serious photographer where a DSLR brick and a set of lenses is needed.

A bit of history.
I have owned a previous Samsung travel zoom for a couple of years now (the WB650) and been happy with it's performance while accepting some limitations.
With the WB650 you have a x15 optical zoom with 24mm at its wide setting and 12 megapixels with GPS tagging. Typical jpg file sizes are 2.65MB.
I found that with this camera the picture quality met my needs. I could have done with a longer zoom. The GPS tagging was tediously slow. I would be standing in Sydney harbour waiting to take my planned shot. Minutes would go by, the boats would change position, a cloud would cover the sun, etc. I often took a shot with no GPS lock and then maybe another later when eventually GPS was attained. Even when having got a GPS signal, if you turned off the camera and then turned it on again a few minutes later and in roughly the same location it could still take 30 seconds to get a fix.
The Intelli-studio PC software was never used as I could not make it store my photos where I wanted.
I remove the SD card, plug it into my PC to copy and paste the photo files to my chosen location.

The new WB850F
The spec. for this camera looks good with a x21 optical zoom with 23mm at its wide setting and 16.2 megapixels with GPS tagging and a wifi capability.
So I thought that with two years elapsed time that Samsung would have made some significant improvements.
I decided to purchase one.
Typical jpg file size is now over 6MB.
I have not taken that many photos due to operational problems.
My main issue has been the camera battery going from fully charged to flat in just a few days, even with the camera switched off. This does not happen with my WB650 camera.
My experience of speaking to Samsung support is that they tell you that it is normal for a battery to go flat in that time.
They are unaware of the correct led light sequence when charging the battery in the camera. So I suspect you are not actually get any help by speaking to Samsung support. It seems that whatever issue you have is regarded as normal.
Samsung have been issuing new firmware for this camera. The firmware updates do not come with much in the way of information on what problem they are addressing. The last firmware update that I tried using the suggested procedure with Intelli-studio failed and the update was withdrawn after a couple of days.

GPS. Well it does not seem any better than with my WB650 and still takes a long time to get a fix. When I use the built in map it even shows the photo taken in a different location to where I actually took it. However, once you get the photo on the PC it seems to correctly locate the photo.

Wifi. This is very flaky and almost useless. I have had multiple problems with it. Even when it works, as the files are 6MB in size it is very slow to transfer data on a decent speed home wifi network. Using a wifi hotspot must be a nightmare. About the only thing it seems to manage well is sending a photo by email to someone where it shrinks the photo file.
If you try to backup photos to cloud using Skydrive do not be fooled by the browser screen where you can select to save your email details and password. Doing this will crash the software. It will work if you tediously key in the entire details on each use.

So summarising my experience so far :-
1) Long lens and better resolution are good.
2) Intelli-studio will not save files where I want and I will not be using it.
3) Wifi is flaky and I will not use.
4) GPS is still slow to get a fix so you need a static scene and patience.
5) Samsung support have not given me any actual usefull information.
6) Battery drain problem

The battery drain problem now seems to have been fixed or at least improved with the latest firmware update.
I was going to return this camera for a refund to The Tech Lodge but they seemed very reluctant to take it back and delayed for ten days before finally agreeing to take it back with all sorts of caveats about testing for the faults. This no doubt would introduce much more delay into the process. The fact that this camera does not really match up to the claims made for it does not seem to matter.

So I am keeping the camera because of the longer lens and better resolution. The GPS is as slow to lock as the old model and is disappointing. The wifi is of no use to me because of its slowness and that fact that I cannot get some features to work at all.

Patience is a virtue.