The LCD partially washed out in bright sunlight, though it was still possible to see enough to frame our images. It gained up in low light just enough to frame the image, though not as much as some of the LCDs we've seen lately. The flash is rated to provide even coverage out to about 10 feet with ISO in auto mode.
Automatic white balance produced very warm, yellowish images with our lab's tungsten lights, while the tungsten white-balance setting had a noticeably bluish cast. Thankfully, the manual setting produced neutral results, though the audience for these cameras is not very likely to set a manual white balance. Given that even Olympus's dirt-cheap FE-series cameras manage to provide a neutral white balance in auto mode, we don't understand why it should be so difficult for this camera, although it does so many things that those Olympus FEs can't even dream of. In natural daylight, the Digimax S800's automatic white balance did a good job of neutralizing colors, which were natural-looking and well saturated.
Even at ISO 50 (the lowest setting possible with this camera), some noise was visible in our test images, though it was very minor and remained so at ISO 100. At ISO 200, noise was very noticeable, causing even moderately dark colors to become mottled with splotches of varying lightness and colors, though many finer details were still unobscured. By ISO 400, the noise overwhelmed lots of detail, resulting in images unfit for print.
Exposures were generally accurate, though images were slightly soft and had noticeable fringing in highlights, especially with backlit subjects. We also noticed JPEG artifacting, which lent a choppy look to some curved edges.
Samsung's Digimax S800 suffers the same fate as so many inexpensive, high-resolution cameras: the drawbacks of excessive noise and image artifacts overshadow the camera's many useful features.
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