samsung nx10
Last thursday samsung gave me a nx10 camera to play with for 10 days. The camera is something in between a micro four thirds and a entry level dslr.
I’m not planning on giving you a full technical test of this camera, for such a review I’ll point you towards dpreview, who did an in depth review of the specs.
I’ll write a more once I have tested and worked with the camera for ten days. Right now I’m going to write down my first impressions.
The camera is very lightweight, fast, easy to handle and produces pictures of astonishing quality for such a small camera. Because it works with the same size chip as the entry level dslr’s, the higher iso are acceptable in the tests I did so far.
Although I love most of the camera there are a couple things that need some work in my opinion. The real drawback is the electronic viewfinder. I understand they had to drop the optical viewfinder for an digital one to keep the body very small and lightweight. What I don’t get is that the viewfinder’s image quality is pretty bad. For sure if you compare it to the LCD on the back.
The second thing i don’t like is the manual focus. First you either have to select it on camera or on the lens depending on which lens you have mounted. That’s confusing and I don’t like it. Second the the viewfinder zooms to help you focus, but the zoom is just showing you the same info in 4 pixels as before in one pixel. This makes it very hard to focus because what you see is all the time a bit unsharp.
Although I’m complaining about the manual focus I can only be amazed by how accurate and fast the autofocus is. It uses the contrast to focus which makes it hard to focus on a rather shallow contrast scene, but for any other circumstance it works wonders.
The 30mm f2 pancake lens is awesome but the kitlens (18-55mm) as with most entry level dslr’s isn’t very good. Although the image quality is pretty ok for a standard low quality lens what disturbs me is it’s size. The whole camera is build to being small and portable. With the kitlens the camera becomes bulky.
The pancake lenses are just great because of there compact size. Although at the moment you can only buy the 30mm f2, my contacts at Samsung Belgium have assured me that before the end of the year there will be a wider range of lenses available.
I said it would be a short review but it turned out to be an almost full review. I’m going to take some more photographs with the camera now and will include some in the next post.
