Samsung continues megapixel race with the 14.7-MPl TL34HD

I was pretty happy with what Samsung was doing with the K10/20D and K100D/200D. Pentax design and Samsung sensors seemed to go well together.

But then Samsung decides to launch 4 new cameras today which most people are tired of seeing by now: digicams with tiny sensors, ridiculously high megapixel counts, and high ISO ranges which produce legendary of amounts of noise.

The TL34HD is the megapixel leader out of the 4, topping the digicam market with 14.7 megapixels. My sister-in-law has a Samsung NV10 and I just was not impressed with it all. The backside was littered with a checkerboard of buttons when just the standard few offered by a Canon Powershot would've done just fine. The shots taken were noisy, smeary, and overprocessed. I can't imagine how the TL34HD will improve upon this.

I'd much rather see camera makers concentrate on other things than higher megapixels. Perhaps Canon could take a hint from the hackers working on CHDK firmware, and start offering official turbo-charged firmware for their next generation of Powershots.

I had been looking at purchasing a S5 IS for a long time since I didn't have a lense going into 400mm territory for my DSLRs. The CHDK firmware available for this camera made it even more attractive.

With the Canon factory firmware settings, the S5 IS has a native aperture of F2.7~F8.0, but with CHDK installed it widens to F2.7~F11.

The native shutter speed ranges from 15 seconds to 1/3200 of a second, but the CHDK the range is augmented to between 65 seconds and 1/33333 of a second.

The applications for the CHDK-enabled firmware are enormous. For example, you could shoot a bullet coming out of a gun chamber.

But the thing that stopped me from going out and buying an S5 IS, nice as it is--and nicer still with the CHDK-enabled firmware--was the noise apparent even at ISO 100. Noise at base ISO makes microstock shooting problematic.

And we're only talking about 8 MPs here, which is already becoming passe in the digicam world. I would've preferred that Canon kept it at 6 MP.

See DPReview for the skinny on the Samsung's new cams.