The Samsung L830 offers a strange mix of photographer-friendly controls, middling performance, and disappointing picture quality. Its slow shooting and poor pictures at higher sensitivity settings seriously hurt the camera’s flexibility, but its generous set of manual exposure and color controls give you plenty of ways to tweak your low-ISO shots.

Considering its scant price tag, the L830 offers a lot of camera for experienced, budget-minded photographers. If you ever need to shoot at ISO 400 or higher, though, look for another camera.

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The camera delivers good, detailed, but not sparkling, mind-blowingly wonderful images.

It’s well made, even if a few niggles get in the way. The camera springs to life quickly and shutter lag is low - but some operational issues prevent it from being the ’decisive moment’ camera. Nevertheless, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts and you can’t help liking the Samsung L83t. Now, if only I could find an MG Midget to photograph.

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The Samsung L700 is a reasonably attractive, nicely built and affordable digital camera aimed at the entry level end of the market.

Despite some quirks, the design is reasonably user-friendly, and image quality is fair at lower ISO sensitivities. Crank the sensitivity up a bit though, and the resulting images get rather soft and noisy. Add in an autofocus system that fails to achieve focus lock too often in low light, and you won’t want to be shooting in those conditions too much. The lens design shows promise in terms of sharpness and has relatively minimal distortion, but needs smaller steps across the zoom range and does suffer from lens flare as well as chromatic aberration unusually far into the center of the image.

If you’re mostly planning on taking outdoors snapshots in good weather though, then the Samsung L700 could fit the bill as an affordable, pocket-friendly camera for day trips.

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Given a rating of three and a half stars out of five, the Samsung NV20 is virtually indistinguisable from the older NV10 model that we reviewed a year ago, both in terms of appearance and features.

A premium-level product that is both well made and well thought out, the notable changes are an increase in resolution to 12.1 megapixels, expansion of the ISO range to 80-3200, and the addition of a Face Detection system. None of these changes really improve the camera - indeed, the new sensor actually makes the image quality worse than before, and has seemingly been included just to look good on the specification sheet.

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The Samsung S85 may look a little dull, but it is a well-made camera with a useful range of features, very good performance and surprisingly excellent picture quality. It has a few odd quirks and is a bit fiddly to operate, but considering the sub-£100 price tag it represents astonishing value for money.

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