Back in July Korean giant Samsung announced a new series of cameras, the NV (New Vision) range that finally, firmly put the 'cheap n cheerful' plastic camera image behind them with three new all-black, all-metal models packed with features and genuinely desirable designs. The unusually proportioned NV7 OPS sits at the top of the range and sports a 7MP CCD, 7x Schneider-branded zoom (38-270mm equiv.), CCD-shift stabilization and a surprisingly sophisticated feature set. It also shares (with the NV10 reviewed recently) Samsung's innovative new 'Smart Touch' user interface and control system, designed to replace pages and pages of menus with two strips of touch sensitive soft keys that offer direct access to almost all the camera's many features and options. The NV7 OPS offers a fairly unique feature set for a camera of this size, but previous Samsungs have failed to offer quite the image quality needed to propel them into the big league. Lets find out if the NV7 OPS is the camera to break the mould, starting as ever with the headline features:
7.4 megapixel CCD
38-270mm equiv. (7x) Schneider-KREUZNACH zoom
Program, Auto, Manual, Aperture & Shutter Priority and Scene exposure modes
ISO 100-1000
Advanced Shake Reduction DSP
In-camera special effects and editing of saved images
Auto Exposure Bracketing
1cm Super Macro mode
MPEG-4 VGA movie mode
43mm filter thread
Optional docking cradle and remote control
NV7 specifications... [read more]