Probably the most outstanding thing about this series of Samsung digital compact camera is the dual LCD screens: The usual LCD on the back, plus an additional front-facing one. The front-facing LCD screen serves two important functions: 1) for taking self-portraits, and 2) capture and focus the attention of babies and young children when you try to take photos of them. The second function is achieved by displaying cartoon pictures on the front-facing LCD screen, so that the little ones will look at the camera, possibly even keeping still for a few seconds while you compose and shoot the photo.

It really worked for my little son who was not even one-year old at that time. I think this is the single biggest benefit of this camera over any other the competition has. The front-facing LCD screen can also serve as a preview/count-down timer, pretty useful if you shoot a lot of self-timer photos.

Other features of the camera are not very different from what the competition has to offer. This is a 12.2 megapixel camera, HD 720x 30fps video, 3.5″ touch-screen LCD screen, 4.6x optical zoom (27-124.2mm). The additional LCD screen on the front is 1.5″.

Physically, the camera looks plain and simple, but with an elegant colour styling on one side. It is quite “meaty”… meaning it has some thickness to it, but it is solidly firm. Unlike the trend toward diminutive ultra-thin designs, this one is easy to grasp and you will not have any fear of it accidentally slipping out of your hands. Of course, the size can also be a bad thing: You are going to notice it in your pockets.

The software has all the usual features you’d expect: face detection, blink detection, smile detection, etc. There are a few physical buttons (power, shutter-release, zoom playback), but most of the interaction is through the touchscreen controls.

I did have one gripe about the camera. It’s slow, particularly in the lag time between shots, getting pretty bad if you also need to recharge the flash. I’m not entirely sure if software could fix this lag (not to recharge the flash faster, of course, but perhaps in the lag time between shots). But there’s no harm checking out Samsung’s website for firmware updates. Nowadays everything digital continues to be fixed and enhanced throughout its sales life (i.e. for as long as the manufacturer continues to sell the product), more more. So not surprisingly, I found an update and promptly updated the camera.

The firmware update did little to improve the lag time between shots. The UI controls do feel a little snappier, and there seems to be a couple of new features. But the lag time between shots is a major bummer if you like to take multiple sequential shots. This will be a show-stopper for some people.

So there you have it, the Samsung ST550.

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This isn’t the first such gadget that I’ve had. This DCS-2121 is actually replacing one of my older DCS-950G network cameras. They were basic, simple cameras, but there was one important feature I wanted that led me to zoom in on D-Link products. I couldn’t determine if other brand of IP cameras (at least of those within reasonable price range) supported video recording to a Samba/CIFS network attached storage, but this was an advertised feature of D-Link IP cameras.

This feature is useful to me, because it means I can have video saved directly to my Linux machine that provides a Samba/CIFS share. No need for me to run a Windows machine loaded with some proprietary camera recording software. Clean and simple The recorded video is saved in AVI format, something that is easily viewable in Mac OS X and Linux, again without requiring any special Windows software. Yes, you can tell I want to avoid having to run Windows at all if possible.

This new DCS-2121 records video at up to 1280×800 resolution (15 fps iirc), although honestly I think 1024×768 is more than sufficient. I would have been happy with D1 resolution, but it is not offered. The camera includes an internal microphone too, so it can pick up some audio if it is close enough to the camera.

If you are already familiar with IP cameras, the DCS-2121 does just about everything you’d expect from any decent IP camera. This includes motion detection, configurable detection area and sensitivity, sending of email upon motion, flipping or mirroring of images (in case you mount the camera upside-down), etc. The live camera view is done using a Java applet, which again is something important for me because it means it will work on browsers other than Internet Explorer, and on non-Windows platforms too.

The DCS-2121 is one step higher than their lowest end model. It still doesn’t have PTZ function. But it picks up audio (built-in) and can stream video in 3gpp format. I think it works quite well if you need basic video surveillance using a standalone IP camera.

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