Samsung HMX-H100 – Expensive And Awful Video Quality
Sum and Substance:
Thumbs Up:
Shutter speed and aperture can be manually controlled, good looking, rotating grip is comfortable.
Thumbs Down:
Auto focus is bad and so is the video quality, very expensive due to presence of SSD.
Inside the Trunk:
Infrared remote control, accessories – hand grip
The Whiz Kid Speaks:
Samsung HMX-H100 is 1080i camcorder, has digital zoom of 100x, optical sensor size is 1/4.5”, has CMOS optical sensor, videos are stored in H.264, minimum shutter speed is 1/12 second, maximum shutter speed is 1/10000 second, white balance presets include daylight, cloudy, fluorescent, tungsten light. The camcorder has built in flash, camcorder sensor resolution is 2.2 mega pixels, camcorder interpolated still resolution is 4.7 mega pixels, images are stored in JPEG format, image resolution options are JPEG 1920 x 1080, JPEG 2880 x 2160, SD memory card are supported.
The device has zoom lens – 3.3 mm – 33 mm – F/1.8-2.5, with focal length of 3.3 mm – 33 mm, lens aperture is F/1.8-2.5 with 10x optical zoom. Minimum focal length is 3.3 mm, maximum focal length is 33mm. Additional features include backlight compensation, touch-screen control, PictBridge support, built-in speaker, direct print, DPOF support. The camcorder has a 2.7 inch TFT LCD touch screen.
Connectors include composite video/audio output, USB, Component video output, HDMI output and there is a slot for putting in expansion card.
Razzle Dazzle:
The camcorder has a very attractive looking design and it is compact which adds to the sleekness. The exteriors are all plastic but it certainly doesn’t look cheap material. The buttons are all placed at right places so you won’t have a hard time to stretch and reach for them. The device is 2.3 inch wide, 5.1 inch deep, 2.4 inch high and weighs 13.4 oz.
Inside Dope:
Camcorders built on solid state drives or SSD are fast becoming popular, the only thing that keeps it from reaching the masses is the high price. However we are sure that with time it will become cheaper and completely replace traditional hard disks even in computers. SSDs are more popular because there are no moving parts and hence less heat dissipation, less noise and larger battery life.
SSD is still costly which means you will have to shell out a premium price if you want to own this device. The all plastic exteriors make this device look good and the keys like photo button, zoom switch, mode, power and record are all located under your forefinger or thumb which makes it easy to operate. Below the device are the connectors for USB, miniHDMI, power connectors and AV.
The grip of the camera rotates up to 150 degrees but it will lock only at 2 positions. Buttons for photo flash, power switch, full auto easy Q, options for image stabilization and display are all located on the interiors of the LCD recess. On the bezel of the LCD there are buttons of record button, Q(uick) menu button and the secondary switch for zoom. If you intend to put this device on the camcorder the hatch might come in the way since the SDHC slot and battery is housed in there.
The camcorder has a touch screen LCD which we thought was one of the worst we have ever seen. Firstly 2.7 inch size is too small for an LCD and the buttons are quite tiny so we ended up mis hitting the icons. This is not an uncommon feature in touch screen camcorders but we were particularly disappointed with the unresponsive touch screen. The device lets you adjust aperture and shutter speed but again they are buried in sub menus so you will have a hard time hunting for them. The Q button is reserved for scene modes, photo and video resolution, exposure compensation, white balance, focus (touchpoint, manual, auto) and for toggling the storage media (SSD or SD)
The HMX-H100 is capable of recording in HD and the resolutions available are 480p, 720p and 1,920×1,080/60i and the videos are stored in MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 encoding. Samsung didn’t tell us the bit rates for recording but in our tests it took 17 MBs of space in a second. You cannot record clips more than 1.8 GB at a time and it will take 7.5 minutes to record 1 GB of video.
HMX-H100 is certainly not one of the better camcorders in the market. We were disappointed to see the auto focus was a bit slow, and it kept hunting for AF in the dark. You will have to use the TouchPoint focus a lot of times and the unresponsive LCD makes things more miserable when using the camcorder. On the positive side, the optical stabilizer worked quite well.
Video quality is OK but don’t expect great color saturation and sharpness that you get from other HD models. We were surprised to see even in bright light conditions there was color noise and dim light conditions further worsened the quality. The camcorder is capable of taking still photos too, but they look overprocessed and smeary.
Nitty Gritty:
We found the whole HMX series (H100, H104, H105, H106) quite disappointing. There is not much in these models that will make you buy it. The performance is terrible and we don’t know what Samsung was thinking when they made a camcorder with such bad video quality.
