Samsung SC-X210L Camcorder Review

Picture & Manual Control
Automatic Control (3.0)
The automatic controls on the SC-X210 are passable, and that’s about all the praise we can give. Given the audience for this camcorder, the auto controls should be much better. Chances are, many people using this will be in shooting situations where they barely have enough time to hit record, let alone fooling with focus and exposure.

The auto focus tends to breathe a little, which is something only the cheapest camcorders tend to do. (Breathing is a steady rhythm of the picture going in focus, then out of focus, then in focus, etc.) This only seemed to occur when the zoom was extended out between 8x and 10x. In closer zoom range, the focus was fine.

The X210's LCD cavity

The X210 has decent auto white balance for outdoors, adjusting very quickly from sunny to shady subjects. Under indoor conditions, however, the results were not so good. A quick look at the stills from Video Performance (see above) shows that neither the auto nor the manual white balance could find an accurate white balance. Bad white balance can skew the entire spectrum and ruin a scene.

The auto exposure is decent. Exposure shifts take about 2 seconds, and snap into place rather than a gradually transitioning. The camcorder does have a limited dynamic range though, meaning that if the auto exposure has adjusted for a brighter subject, most of the details will be lost in a shadowy area of the frame, and vice versa.

There are a few auto controls that you might find useful, even while dangling from the cliffs Kilimanjaro. The X210 offers three Program AE modes that are tailored for peak exposure settings in certain shooting environments. They include Sports, Spotlight, and Sand/Snow. Auto white balance settings include full auto, Daylight, Fluorescent, and Tungsten.

The X210 also offers a backlight compensation (BLC), which boosts the overall exposure to correct for subject overly backlit (i.e., standing in front of a window). This tends to blow out the background, but increases detail in the subject.

Finally, no modern camcorder would be complete without a few super-cheesy digital effects. Here, Samsung includes such classic hits as Art, Mosaic, Sepia, Negative, Mirror, and Black & White. These are hilarious effects that will have you friends laughing for up to two minutes. After that, you will never use them again.

Overall Manual Control (2.25)
The manual controls of the SC-X210 are extremely limited, which should come as no surprise to anyone. Who has time to adjust shutter speed when you’re burning down a hill at 25mph on your mountain bike? At least, that’s what I imagine was tossed around the Samsung boardroom some time last year. And who can argue? If you want manual control and you’re sold on Samsung, they offer plenty of MiniDV and DVD camcorders. This camcorder is clearly directed at a different market.

Most of the manual control operation is done through the joystick, a little nub of a thing that sits on the upper rear of the camcorder. While very, very small, the joystick does not suffer from some of the problems that the Sanyo VPC-HD1 (Review, Specs, $499.99), which has a similarly sized controller. In the Sanyo’s case, the joystick had a hard time differentiating between your movements in the cardinal directions (up, down, left, and right) and movements inward (for the “enter” function). Not so with the Samsung. While it’s not the most comfortable controller in the camcorder world, they did manage to avoid that particular problem.

The menu layout of the X210 is surprisingly straightforward, which is more than we can say for most camcorders. There are two main menus, the Mode menu and the manual control menu pertaining to each mode. Pushing the Mode button calls up a spinning, circular menu to select from among the four operating modes – Movie, Photo, MP3, and Voice Recorder – along with file browser and system settings.

An animated gif of the menu in video mode.

Once you’re in a mode, pushing the Menu button calls up the manual control menu for that particular mode. In movie mode, you have options for image size, image quality, white balance, Program AE, digital effects, electronic image stabilization, focus methods, backlight compensation, digital zoom, record mode, and line in/out (to determine the path of the AV line). All this is navigated through the joystick with ease. Well done, Samsung.

The SC-X210 does offer manual focus and manual white balance, which are the only things we could really classify as a proper manual control. Focus is operated by the joystick and is probably only useful on rare occasions due to the poor handling. Manual white balance is not much better. The Video Performance section (above) shows that the colors would not properly adjust.

It would be remiss of us, of course, to neglect mentioning that every other camcorder in this price range has more manual controls. All camcorders tend to give you exposure control, however rudimentary, while this has none. This also has no shutter speed, which you would find on the all Panasonics, Canons, and JVCs. Sony does not offer shutter speed control on most of their consumer camcorders.

Zoom (4.0)
The zoom toggle is located on the upper rear of the camcorder, a small switch that slides up and down. From the outset, its seems to be a counter-intuitive design. You push up to zoom out, and down to zoom in. This strikes of illogicality. Pushing up seems to be a naturally forward motion. Not so to the designers of the X210.

That’s not our only issue with the zoom. The toggle only allows for one speed of zooming regardless of how much pressure you put on it. Most camcorders have between 2-4 speeds and a pressure-sensitive control. The Canon ZRs and Elura 100 (Specs, $379.19) offer three pre-set speeds that you can select from the menu. The X210’s control is not poorly placed (where else could they have put it?) but this is not a finely-tuned control by any means.

Zoom Power/Ratio (10.0)
The SC-X110L features a 10x optical zoom and 100x digital zoom. The digital zoom can be disabled in the menu, but when digital zoom is enabled, it cannot be capped at a lower max, i.e. 50x rather than 100x. Nonetheless, Samsung included a quality control feature in last year’s model, and has modified that feature for this year. With digital zoom enabled, a zoom would stop at 10x on the SC-X205L (Specs, ). Continuing the zoom into digital territory – 10x-100x – required another tap on the zoom toggle. This measure was intended to prevent an unintentional jump to digital zoom by requiring the user to actively choose to enter digital zoom.

This year, the SC-X210L simply pauses the zoom for a split second at the boundary between optical zoom and digital zoom, then continues. You no longer need to actively choose to enter digital zoom, but simply keep pressing on the toggle. Users who want to think as little as possible about shooting may appreciate not having to actively choose override of the optical/digital boundary (with a finger flick). Those who are serious about image quality – and that includes us at Camcorderinfo.com – will find this year’s continuous zoom (with a brief pause) to be a step in the wrong direction. Unless you really dig funky art-school-style pixilation, we recommend disabling digital zoom.

Focus (4.0)
The manual focus is available through the menu. Once you have selected “MF,” exit the menu and push the joystick up or down to adjust the focus. There is absolutely no indication that you are in manual focus mode, despite the camcorder having no apprehensions about putting an “AF” icon in the screen when you are in auto focus mode. Also, there is no scale to let you know where in the focus range you are. While the LCD screen is of a higher resolution that you’ll find on most camcorders, 2.0 inches is not really enough to have a proper reading of the focus. Therefore, you’ll probably want to leave it in auto.

Exposure (Aperture) (0.0)
There is no exposure control on the SC-X210L, not an aperture control, and not a EV adjustment option either. You’ll find at least one of these, if not both, on every other camcorder that we talk about in this review. To not have any exposure control means that the camcorder must have excellent automatic responses, which it does not. The auto controls are fine, but the metering difficulties that this camcorder’s likely audience will experience (i.e., snow, beach, water, etc.) would make a manual exposure control seemingly obligatory. With such a small imager on the primary lens, the ability to boost exposure would be invaluable. Likewise, the fixed aperture of the external lens means it has a tendency to blow out. If there was any control they should have given the external lens (even as a digital correction function), it should have been exposure control.  

Shutter Speed (0.0)
There is no manual shutter speed on the SC-X210L. Most other camcorders in this price range have shutter speed control, except for Sonys.

White Balance (4.0)
The manual white balance on the X210 is found in the menu, under the label “custom.” Making a white balance setting for the first time does not fill you with confidence in the camcorder’s ability. Normally, you would hold a white balance card or other flat, white object in front of the camcorder and press a button, telling the camcorder that this is what “white” should look like. You push the button and an icon blinks for a few seconds while it adjusts. When the blinking stops, you know the white balance has been set.

The X210 is less clear in its process. You push the button, and nothing happens. There is no blinking, no chiming, no anything to tell you if the adjustment has occurred or not. You may notice a change in the color tone of the white subject, but in most cases we did not. As seen in the Video Performance section (above) the custom white balance setting did not look great. The colors tended towards the green-grey. We were disappointed. But auto white balance made the picture overly red-orange. You’ll have to play around with it yourself to get the best image.

Gain (0.0)
There is no manual gain control. All Panasonics offer this control, and most JVCs offer a powerful auto gain control that can be turned on and off.

Other Manual Control (0.0)
There is no other manual control on the SC-X210L.