Samsung Digimax L74

Review summary: Nikon's CoolPix S52 is a decent and quite stylish digital camera. It looks great and takes fairly good photos, although they have some noise issues and the camera's performance is painfully slow at times.

Pros: Minimal chromatic aberration, stylish design

Cons: Extremely slow at times, pictures somewhat grainy

Review summary: Very well constructed and stylized, it was ''love at first sight'' with the Samsung L74W; however, we were later disappointed by its image quality. In the end, we prefer the Canon A570 IS which is much less classy but is more precise and stabilized.

Review summary: The Samsung L74 Wide ($300) is a rather unique digital camera. Not for its design, wide-angle lens, SVGA movie mode, or huge touchscreen LCD, though all of those make it appealing. What really separates the L74 from the rest of the crowd its its ...

Pros: Stylish, very well built body ; Wide-angle lens starts at 28mm ; Huge, 3-inch touchscreen LCD display ; Advanced Shake Reduction works fairly well, though slows down shot-to-shot speeds ; AF-assist lamp ; good low light focusing ; Very little redeye ; ...

Cons: Images are soft and fuzzy ; some overexposure and blown highlights ; Poor white balance in mixed lighting ; Touchscreen user interface can be slow and frustrating to use ; LCD difficult to see outdoors ; No optical viewfinder ; Unimpressive continuous ...

Verdict: The L74 Wide doesn't just have built-in memory -- it has 450MB of built-in memory! Now, a lot of that (around 217MB) is taken up by the World Tour Guide, but if you don't want that feature, you are free to delete it. If you want to add more memory to ...

Review summary: The L74's wide-angle lens, 3-inch touchscreen interface, and unique Tour Guide feature set it apart from competitors, but photographers who demand first-rate image quality will likely be disappointed.