Samsung ST5500 and ST5000: AMOLED screen, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, you name it
Samsung may just have come up with the camera highlight of CES 2010 with the CL80 and its little brother the TL240
We were massively underwhelmed by Samsung's new NX10 interchangeable lens system, but the company has redeemed itself with the ST5500 and ST5000, two cameras that pack in just about every feature you could think of. In fact, if we had to pick our favourite camera of the show, we'd plant that particular smacker on the ST5500.
Firstly, it's chuffin' gorgeous. Nextly, it packs a mahoosive 94mm (3.7-inch) AMOLED touchscreen that's a pleasure to use. The screen lets you swipe your finger over a picture to delete it, and scrolling by tilting the camera is possible thanks to an accelerometer.
Inside its sleek metal frame, the ST5500 packs a 14.2-megapixel sensor and 7x optical zoom. It shoots 720p video. Like a couple of other cameras at the show, it boasts an angled base for better group shots.
The range of sharing options is mindblowing: you can zap an image to another camera or device via DLNA, blast it off by Bluetooth, or swoosh it into cyberspace with Wi-Fi. It even has an email address book. There's basically no excuse for you not to have your photos and videos on Facebook, Flickr or YouTube within moments of shooting them. It's a similar range of features to the Sony HX5, which does have a slightly longer zoom, but to this Craver the ST5500 edges it on looks.
The Samsung ST5000, pictured above, also boasts an AMOLED screen but no Wi-Fi. That should knock a few quid off the price, but we won't know the pricing for either camera until spring of this year.
Update: A previous version of this story referred to the cameras by their US model names, but we have now confirmed the UK names. The ST5500 is called the CL80 in the States, while the ST5000 is the TL240. These cameras don't include GPS, which is featured on the WB650.