Samsung HZ30W is a hater

Here are a few image samples that highlight the poor image quality of the Samsung HZ30W (aka WB600) camera. Sure, it has a 12-megapixel sensor, but in this case more pixels only means there are more pixels to look like garbage.

Samsung hates Winston Churchill:

Note the "jittery" noise clearly evident all around his face, hand, and medals. This same noise is also apparent along the capstone above the banner (meaning this noise is not in the banner itself, but rather from the Samsung that took this picture of the banner).

Samsung hates trees:

These trees look plastic. This appears to be the result of selective blur, which tends to make images look like plastic if done without regard to the subject. Also notice the "jittery" noise again in this image along otherwise straight lines.

Both of these images are unscaled crops from this review of the Samsung WB600. These same effects (or rather, defects) occur in nearly all of the images on that page, whether the images have a low or a high ISO rating (which affects sensor graininess), low or high shutter speed (which affects motion blur), and focal length/aperture width (which both affect focus). I was originally thinking that the jittery noise was due to the built-in Image Stabilization (IS), but that shouldn't cause any visible artifact in exposures with high shutter speeds, which would experience little to no motion blur anyway as a result of camera shake. That's not the case as it's present in images with shutter speeds up to 1/500 second.

Samsung also hates children and... water?

My son even looks like plastic. The water behind him has what I call "speckle" noise, where the water is relatively smooth except for a number of significantly brighter or darker small spots (most of them are very short horizontal or vertical lines). This is probably another result of indiscriminate selective blur performed on a fairly noisy (or "grainy") image. This image was taken at ISO 240, so that is likely the case.

This is an unscaled crop from a picture my mother took of my son with her HZ30W.


Can this image processing be disabled on the camera? Even if it can be disabled, a better question is, "Why does it process images this badly by default?" Do people really want jittery, plastic-looking images from their fancy cameras?

Ironically, my wife's 4-year old Nikon Coolpix E4600 produces consistently better images with its 4-megapixel sensor than this Samsung. Of course, you could simply blur or scale the Samsung's images by about 50% to get similar quality, but you would have only 3-megapixel images as a result. So much for technological progress.

I won't even go into a full comparison of this camera with my recently-acquired Canon EOS 10D DSLR camera, but suffice it to say that it blows this camera out of the water in terms of image quality with its 6.3-megapixel sensor. It even cost me almost the same as a new HZ30W—about $150 with shipping and handling. (If I wanted to buy a really high-end lens for the 10D, then yes, it would cost me a pretty penny, but that's not even an option available with the HZ30W. Just sayin'...).

NB: I saved the above crops as PNG images to avoid introducing any further noise. The original pictures were saved as JPEG in "Superfine" or "Fine" quality. The noise in these images are not characteristic of the noise introduced by JPEG compression (such as reduced color resolution and sharp edges along 8x8 pixel boundaries), especially at these high quality levels.