There were hints at PMA in February and now the new SLR-like Samsung has been sited in China
Alas Samsung's new baby isn't as pretty as the artist impressions (above) we saw at PMA.
Update 2nd June, 2005: Samsung Pro815 officially launched
Read our News Story from February - What is Samsung's mystery camera?
At the PMA show in Orlando, Florida, at the end of February, we saw an intriguing illustration on the Samsung booth that hinted at an exciting new enthusiast camera in the pipeline. Reports from a Chinese IT trade show suggest that this is none other than Samsung's new Digimax Pro 815, complete with a record-breaking 15x optical zoom lens.
Dpnow friend and technical adviser, Danny Chau, was able to translate a report on the Chinese site, PConline.com.cn. There wasn't a lot of technical detail, though the 15x 7.2-108mm Schneider Kreuznach Varioplan labelled lens is described, along with a shooting rate of 2.5 frames per second. Danny adds that the camera features a large 1900mAh/7.4V battery and a quick response time - probably meaning quick start up time.
Pictures on the PConline site show that the camera shares some of its look and layout with the Sony DSC-F828, though there doesn't appear to be a tilting body. Instead, Samsung is featuring what it claims is the biggest digital camera LCD monitor, measuring 3.5 inches diagonally, dwarfing the current popular large screen size of 2.5 inches. It would be stretching artistic licence to suggest the design resembles the attractive artistic impressions shown at PMA. Indeed, from the pictures, the Pro 815 looks like a rather strange and bulky-looking beast.
There is no confirmation of the sensor size or resolution of the camera, but with a model name of '815' - '15' probably means 15x zoom and we suspect the '8' denotes an 8 megapixel sensor. As there are no compact sensors of this resolution apart from the 2/3rd inch Sony 8MP part used by Konica Minolta, Olympus, Canon and Nikon, we're pretty confident that this is what Samsung have opted for too.
If that guess is correct, the 7.2-108mm zoom represents an equivalent zoom range of 28-420mm in 35mm format terms. Compare that to the Nikon CoolPix 8800, with 'only' a 10x (35-350mm equiv) zoom, or the 5MP Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ5 with a 12x 36-432mm (equiv) zoom range. The Digimax 815 Pro appears to provide both a serious 28mm equivalent wide angle and super telephoto reach at the other end of the scale.
Samsung has not officially announced the Digimax 815 Pro outside of China, though the PConline article indicates that we can expect the Pro 815 to ship in July or August.
