By Max M. (Portland Or)

We have had the camera for about a week and are really enjoying it. The large 3″ screen is awsome. I have taken quite a few macro close up pictures and they are clear. At the maximun magnification the pictures using the scenery mode are clear without blurring from camera motion. The motion picture feature at 30 fps is smooth and fun to work with.
I have not been able to find a spare battery or charger yet. Before I take it on a long trip, I would like to carry a spare battery.

By Jonathan March (East Hampton, CT USA)

As another person has mentioned - this camera has one big “con” - when taking indoor pictures, especially of darker rooms or items, it can take an EXCESSIVE time after the flash goes off before you are able to take another picture. Either the green standby LED keeps flashing, and /or the word “Processing!” comes across the screen - sometimes for up to 12 seconds, before the camera “comes back” and is ready to take another shot.Another weird annoyance - when the camera finally does recover from the last picture, there is a bug that sometimes happens with the shutter button - it acts “dead” until you try pressing it 2 , sometimes 3, attempts, at which point it seems to “wake back up”. Weird. You’d be really screwed at an indoor wedding if you were trying to take pictures of couples making their entrance, dances, etc.
10 seconds is how long cameras took in the early 90’s to recover for “next shot” . Inexcusable today, with 4gig SDHD cards, huge internal memory, fast processors, etc.

Finally - after charging the the (very unique) battery - it went from 3(full) bars, right down to 2 bars really quickly (doing a mix of stills & video tests) - and subsequently dying very quickly.
I used it about a half hour, and the battery was dead?!

Yes - this camera has a combination of features and image quality, thats hard if not impossible to match (next closest thing is the rather poor-pictured Casio EXV8)…. but there is definitely something funky going on with the i85 that really is a fatal flaw for indoor shooting.

I called tech support, and in typical corporate-speak, they “never heard” that complaint, said they would email the product team to get back to me- that was only 2 business days ago. Maybe the next revision if the otherwise great i85 will fix these problems.

• Read more About Samsung Digimax i85

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