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The Samsung Genio Slide's 3.2-megapixel camera has a very user-friendly touchscreen user interface – consistent with Samsung's higher-grade cameraphones – but its fixed focus shooter is a middle of the range shooter in terms of overall image quality.
The camera takes only a couple of seconds to fire up from standby, with a press of the side-mounted camera button. The camera automatically switches into landscape view, with eight control icons dotted either side of the display.
The camera has a reasonable set of function options for this grade of snapper – it incorporates functions such as a Smile Shot (when engaged it waits to spot a smile before the snap is taken), multi-shot shooting, and a rather neat motion sensor accelerometer-aided panorama shooting mode that stitches together shots with barely any effort from the user.
A bunch of modes are available for different kinds of lighting environments or shooting situations including a night mode and sports mode for fast moving objects.
Timer and brightness controls are included, plus regular settings adjustments for white balance and a series of colour-tint effects.
You can use image editing software to tweak snaps and add post-shooting effects, text, captions, clip art and so on, with easy to use onscreen tools
OUTDOORS: The Samsung Genio Slide has a fixed focus 3.2-megapixel camera that offers a decent user interface but limited shooting performance. Images are reasonable for this sort of camera but detail and quality are limited
TONES: Colour reproduction is rich for snaps, and it handles tones reasonably well, though the shot appears slightly soft
NATURAL LIGHT: Again, it produces colourful snaps with a decent tonal range, but it is somewhat soft where you may be expecting crisper detail
CLOUDY DAY: It takes reasonable shots in murky conditions, dealing effectively with changing contrast and lighting conditions
FOLIAGE: The lack of focus control means you have to shoot and hope when it comes to getting objects in focus. Here, the colours look acceptably vivid, but it's not capable of selecting the foreground branches to be in focus
OVERCAST: Taken in subdued overcast conditions, colours look fine, though there is a bit of burn out of the trees against the sky in the background
ARTIFICIAL LIGHT: Without any sort of flash or LED illumination shots taken inside in artificial light are soft and unsatisfactory
LOW LIGHT: In darker conditions, like this shot in the early evening, the camera is unable to produce more than a basic low quality shooting performance with grainy images
PANORAMA: The panorama shooting mode works really well – using the automatic motion sensor inside, the camera can quickly match up frames and stitch them together for easy panoramas. You can't get full the highest quality images in this mode, however
SPORTS MODE: There is a sports mode for capturing moving subjects
As is common on mid-tier Samsungs, it's also possible to upload images straight to online services and social networking sites – all you have to do is select which you want from a pre-defined list of services.
With a 3.2-megapixel camera with a fixed focus lens, you can't expect superb shooting results, but for this grade of cameraphone, the Genio Slide puts in a respectable performance.
Of course, with no focus control you can't get beautifully focused compositions, but the camera is able to take decent snaps with naturally rich colour rendition, competent automatic handling of exposure and contrast plus a reasonable level of detail for this sort of camera.
With no flash or photo light of any description, however, low light shooting isn't great, and in dark environments results are poor.
The Genio Slide can also capture video, although shooting at maximum QVGA quality (320x240 pixels) at 15 frames per second, it is limited in terms of playback quality. It'll do for online uploads perhaps, but it's pretty lacklustre low-grade phone level.
