Samsung has always been a source of controversy with me, mostly because I’m never sure what I’ll find when I start tackling one of their products.  Samsung has a tendency to be a weird innovator, and this has a tendency to work both for and against them.  This time, in the case of the Samsung TL100, Samsung’s weird innovator tendencies will work against them.

The Samsung TL100 is a twelve megapixel camera with a 3x optical zoom (5x digital), a 2.7 inch LCD monitor, dual image stabilizers, face detection, smile detection, scene recognition, various scene, autofocus and white balance modes, MPEG-4 video recording capability and forty megs of onboard memory.

While the camera’s performance isn’t bad–and you can see from the spec sheet it’s not exactly lacking, there are a couple problems here that need addressing.  There’s no touchscreen, which by itself really isn’t a big deal, but it’s when you consider how small the camera is that you’ve got a fairly serious problem.  This thing is too small to use easily, and that’s a problem.

And considering that this sucker retails for a whopping hundred and eighty bucks, there are vastly better cameras–and bargains–available than the Samsung TL100 will ever hope to be.