Samsung sets its sights on becoming a top-tier digital camera brand by 2010, displacing Kodak, Sony or Canon.
Steven Cordova, sales and marketing VP, said at a recent press conference that Samsung said the company would “leverage every resource at its disposal” to unseat the top players in the camera market, drawing on the strength of “new people, new energy and new ideas” in the company’s revamped camera division.
To kick-start the effort, the company unveiled three models in a new NV series (for “new vision”). The NV series is the culmination of two years of research and development efforts and is geared toward sophisticated camera owners, said Joong-Koo Lee, president/CEO, Samsung Techwin.
The NV series will feature several firsts for Samsung, including a CCD-shifting Anti-Shake technology, a 10-megapixel model and a new user-interface. It will also feature model with portable media player (PMP) capability, the second Samsung camera to offer that functionality.
The 10-megapixel NV10 sports a new graphical user interface with a touch pad located alongside its 2.5-inch, 230K-pixel LCD screen. The compact camera features a newly developed Advanced Shake Reduction (ASR) system which electronically compensates for image blur caused by camera motion.
The NV10 will ship in the fall for a suggested $399.99.
The NV7 OPS will occupy what marketing manager Stewart Henderson dubbed as the “slim bridge” category, combining ultra-zoom optics with a compact camera body. The NV7 OPS features a 7x optical zoom lens (38-270 mm, 35mm equivalent) with CCD-shifting image stabilization and ASR.
It will also ship in the fall for a suggested $449.99.
Finally, the 7-megapixel NV3 will offer PMP functionality. It ships with Samsung’s Digimax Converter software for converting MPEG, AVI, MOV, WMV and ASF movie files and WAV and MP3 audio files into a format capable of being play on the NV3. It will ship in the fall for a suggested $349.99.
