Although it may seem a trifle odd to have a snap’n'shoot camera boasting such high resolution, there’s obviously a motive to the madness, even beyond the pure features-to-the-pound extravagance.

Whatever the plan, Samsung has certainly got the build of the V6 right. The greyish hue to the casework is a refreshing change from the brushed silver finishes of the competition, and the camera feels solid in the hand, and is big enough to limit camera shake except in dramatically failing light. The flash is off to one side, and the longish body allows it to sit away from the lens. While there’s red-eye reduction available, we found that the couple of times we forgot to press the button to engage it, the results didn’t suffer too badly anyway. The one major downer about the design is the LCD viewing screen, which at a piddly 1.5 inches across isn’t exactly what we’ve grown accustomed to of late. It’s not only a bit small for reviewing images, but it’s also too small for using when framing shots – a big minus mark for general usability.

It’s a shame, because the back panel of the Samsung Digimax V6 also features an intuitive and well laid-out system of buttons, rocker pads and dials, which may look a tad daunting at first but soon becomes second nature.

These include a rather neat Navipad, which allows you instant access to important controls such as self-timer, macro and flash. A neat function enables the camera to remember the last setting for flash.

The zoom is also controlled from the back panel, it manages to get into the heart of the action and focusing on automatic is quick and generally pretty accurate.

The Digimax V6 is occasionally frustrating when you get caught unprepared; by the time the lens pops out and you are ready to shoot, all but the most posed of ‘snap’ shots would be well over. It feels like about ten seconds, but in reality it’s actually close to four, which is still too long.

Another disappointing time factor comes after you take an image – the higher the quality, the longer it takes to write to the card. We can accept that, but the delay here really is a bit on the long side. There’s more drag factor when it comes to moving images between the camera and your computer as it uses USB 1.1, instead of the speedier 2.0.

Great resolution

Samsung Digimax V6 stores pictures to a supplied 32MB memory card, which you will obviously need to upgrade if you are planning on shooting at the quality offered by the 6.1 megapixels. While SD cards aren’t the cheapest memory option, they are readily available and prices are dropping all the time.

So far so good, but as we well know, image quality is about more than just about megapixels. Let’s start with the good stuff: colour reproduction is top notch for such an affordable digital camera, with skin tones faring particularly well. Outdoor scenes also come across naturally and on the surface there is a good degree of detail recorded by the CCD.

However, blow the pictures up, and you’ll be hard pushed to convince someone that they were looking at a 6-megapixel camera rather than a 5 or even a top-notch 4AAP camera. There’s a hint of softness and blurring to the picture that suggests the money has been spent on recording the image rather than processing it. Don’t get us wrong, the Digimax V6 is far from being a bad camera. It’s a very clever little beast, with plenty of features, including that whopping resolution.