Continuing in the footsteps of
the NV10, the NV11 brings a bit of fine-tuning to the interface
devised for the NV10, moving one setting from here to there
and making room for a couple of new modes. Overall though,
the changes are minor and the interface is very similar. And,
like the NV10, the NV11, the second New Vision (NV) camera,
offers a drastically different interface control than most
cameras currently on the market.
Controlling the camera — aside from the zoom and the
shutter release — depends entirely on the Smart Buttons
aligned to the right and below the monitor. Getting accustomed
to the system takes a few minutes at first, but quickly becomes
efficient for most settings with one exception: setting the
aperture and shutter speed. For these items, integral elements
of the ASM modes, the interface is simply inefficient and
demands too much effort from the user.
Similarly, an argument could be made that while the Setup
menu is easily accessible from the playback mode, the access
to the Setup menu from the capture modes is too complex since
it demands accessing the second tier of icons through
to get the icon that opens the Setup menu.
The Setup menu is composed of four sections,
the tabs for which are aligned at the bottom of the screen
so they correspond to the Smart Buttons below.
The first section contains the following options:
OSD Set controls the way options are presented on the
monitor when the camera is set to a capture mode:
Full: the name of the setting appears
next to its icon on the monitor when the Smart Key next
to it is lightly touched.
Basic: touching the Smart Keys does
not display the name of the function.
Hide: on-screen information disappears
after 3 seconds if the camera is not used. When the
shutter release is pressed halfway, the shutter speed
and aperture are displayed on the monitor.
LCD Save: turns off the monitor if
the camera is not used for 30 seconds.
OSD Set: offers the same first three options
as above, but applicable to the Playback mode.
File: serves to choose if the file names
of photos and movies are incremented consecutively or re-start
at 0001 when the memory/card has been formatted, or all
images deleted.
Language selects the interface language:
English, Korean, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Simplified
Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Portuguese,
Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Finnish, Thai, Malaysian/Indonesian,
Arabic, Polish, Hungarian, Czech or Turkish.
Date & Time: serves to set the date
and time on the NV11, including the date format.
The second section offers:
Imprint: decides whether or not the time
and date of capture is permanently imprinted on images.
LCD serves to set the intensity of the
monitor's back light: Dark, Normal, Bright.
AF Lamp: serves to turn On of Off the
AF Assist lamp that comes on when there is not enough ambient
light for the auto focus system to operate reliably.
Power Off: selects the time period after
which the camera shuts down automatically when it is unused
(1, 3, 5 or 10 minutes).
Quick View decides whether or not an
image is displayed on the monitor immediately post capture:
Off or 0.5, 1 or 3 seconds.
The third section contains:
Start Image decides if or what image
is displayed on the monitor when the camera is turned
On: Off, the Samsung logo or an image captured with
the camera.
Sound Volume: serves to set the Playback
volume (Off, Low, Medium, High).
Beep Sound: decides what, if any,
sound is produced by the camera when it is operated
(Off, Sound 1, Sound 2, Sound 3).
Start Sound: selects the sound the
camera produces at start-up (Off, Sound 1, Sound 2,
Sound 3).
Finally, the fourth section has the following options:
Format: serves to format the internal
memory of the NV11, or if there is a card present, the memory
card. All images are erased, even those that have been marked
as protected.
Copy to card: to copy images from the
NV11's internal memory to a memory card. Worth noting, if
there are images in the internal memory, copying them to
the memory card can only be done when the camera is set
to a capture mode or when there
are images on the memory card already, as otherwise the
camera displays the message "no images" and does
not offer an access to the Setup menu.
Video Out: NTSC or PAL.
Reset: returns all the NV11's options
to their factory defaults with the exception of the date,
time, language, and video out signal.
A printed, multilingual, and thin "User's Manual"
accompanies the NV11. The manual is a simple introduction
to the camera that explains how to load the battery, install
the USB driver on a computer, take pictures and view them
on a computer. The complete user manual is available in PDF
format on line.
Software
A single CD accompanies the North
American version of the Samsung NV11. The disc , Samsung
NV11, contains software for Microsoft
Windows only (98, 98 SE, 2000, ME and XP):
Storage Driver (the USB driver)
Digimax Master
Adobe Reader
Digimax Biz Reader and its user manual
in PDF format.
Although Macs have no difficulty reading the images in the
camera when it is connected via USB, they will not be able
to use the BIZ mode which serves to capture photos of business
cards so they can be used for optical character recognition
using Biz Reader as all the software supplied is only for
Windows.
Windows users should note that the installer program on the
disc requires a reboot after installation. A "restart
later" option is offered, but if somehow the program
is told to go ahead and restart the computer — the default
— any work in progress that has not been saved will
be lost as the installer forces the shut down of all running
programs, regardless of their attempt to save files.
Aside from the addition of Aperture
and Shutter Priority modes, the NV11 offers a new special
scene mode simply called BIZ. The mode places
a large black rectangular frame on the screen, so that a business
card can be placed in the middle and photographed. Then, once
the image has been imported into a computer with Samsung's
NV11 software, Digimax Biz Reader can be
used to open the photographed business cards.
The program is supposed to do
character recognition on the image, and place the information
into a database. Regrettably, after testing the program on
well over a dozen business cards, it appears to be of limited
use as it is incapable of reading even simple and clear text
with any reasonable degree of accuracy. And, when the entire
process is taken into account — photographing the business
card, loading it into the computer, and running the recognition
software — simply typing the information into a contact
database would be considerably faster and would avoid the
time-consuming editing and correction Digimax Biz Reader requires.
Digimax Master, the other program supplied
with the camera is much more interesting. Primarily an image
browser, it opens a window with tools at the top, the computer's
folder in a window below, and presents the contents of the
currently selected folder on the right, using thumbnails whose
sizes can be increased or decreased at will. Moreover, with
an image selected from the thumbnails, its shooting date can
be displayed in an area below the folders, or in a separate
window.
The tools offered at the top of the screen allow changing
the orientation of an image or a group of images, deleting
images, sending them by e-mail, printing a selected photo,
or viewing them as a slide show.
In addition, a series of images
can be selected for editing, a process that places the images
in the Picture Tray, on the right of the editing window, from
where they can be selected for editing in the main window.
Tools are provided to resize, crop, change the canvas size,
rotate, straighten the horizon, wallpaper, add frames and
edges, and create calendars.
More advanced editing tools
are also offered to adjust the image quality: auto image quality,
autoclean, lightness, hue and saturation, auto exposure, variations,
red-eye sharpness, blur, and clone. Moreover the image can
be deformed, have artistic effects applied, or be warped in
any number of ways.
Beyond these, tools are provided to deform images, add artistic
effects or textures, and what is remarkable is that all these
corrections can be limited to areas defined by the geometric
or lasso selection tools.
Digimax Master is an interesting program that deserves to
be explored.
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Interface & Software
to get the icon that opens the Setup menu. 
OSD Set controls the way options are presented on the
monitor when the camera is set to a capture mode:
OSD Set: offers the same first three options
as above, but applicable to the Playback mode.
