The Samsung L85 is a small (though not tiny) zoom compact boasting 8 million pixels a 5X optical zoom and a couple of features you won’t find anywhere else such as HDMI interface. On paper we placed it as the second best value in our £250 camera roundup. Let’s see how it performs in the real world.

All the articles on the Samsung L85 talk about its HDMI interface. If you want to show pictures on a high definition TV screen then currently the L85 is the one for you. There are also a couple of other features that deserve a mention.

Drop the Samsung L85 into the supplied cradle and you can hook it up either to your computer, or to a regular TV like most cradles. However, if you have one of the latest HDTVs then you can also attach the L85 directly to it and enjoy extremely high quality playback - or so I’m told. I wasn’t able to locate an HDTV during this review so we’ll just take Samsung’s word for it.

It’s also worth pointing out here that the camera has a “wideâ€? mode which sets the camera to take pictures in a wide aspect ratio. Coupled with the HDMI interface you might expect this to match a widescreen TV format. You’d be wrong - it takes pictures in a 2:1 ratio which makes for great panoramics but they won’t fit on your TV.