Samsung NX10 at a glance
- Hybrid Entry-Level Camera
- 14.6-million-pixel APS-C-sized CMOS sensor
- 3in AMOLED screen
- Electronic viewfinder
- HD video capture
- Street price around £520 with 18-55mm kit lens
In August 2008, Panasonic and Olympus jointly announced the revolutionary new Micro Four Thirds system. Not to be outdone, 25 days later Samsung executive vice-president Byung Woo Lee announced, in an exclusive interview with AP, that Samsung was also going to introduce its own hybrid system. Like the Micro Four Thirds system, Samsung’s new family of cameras would do away with the conventional SLR mechanism by removing the mirror box and optical viewfinder. The difference between the two systems would be that Samsung would use APS-C-sized sensors, which were larger than the Four Thirds sensors that were planned for the Olympus and Panasonic cameras.
Roll on 18 months and the Micro Four Thirds cameras from both Olympus and Panasonic have become one of the great recent successes in the photographic industry. At the time of writing there have been eight Micro Four Thirds cameras, backed up by a strong range of 11 lenses and various accessories.
Now it is Samsung’s turn to release its mirrorless, nterchangeable-lens camera to the world. It uses the same 14.6-million-pixel APS-C-sized CMOS sensor as the Samsung GX-20, Pentax K20D and K-7, and has a built-in electronic viewfinder. There are three lenses available: an 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6, a 50-200mm f/4-5.6 and a slim, fixed-focal-length 30mm f/2 pancake. These three lenses should cover the basic needs of most photographers, both in terms of portability and focal length.
The NX10’s compact build, tried-and-tested APS-C-sized sensor, 3in AMOLED screen and 1280×720 HD video capture make it a fantastic model on paper. However, with Panasonic and Olympus making significant headway in the market, Samsung’s NX10 must offer enough to tempt those who have so far resisted buying a hybrid micro-system camera.
Features
It is, of course, the size of the Samsung NX10 that is its standout feature. Instead of relying on a traditional optical reflex mechanism, a rear 3in screen or a built-in electronic viewfinder is used to compose images. This greatly reduces the size of the NX10 compared to a traditional digital SLR.
The image displayed on the rear screen and in the viewfinder is captured by a 14.6-million-pixel APS-C-sized CMOS sensor. For more details on this, see Features in use.
As with Micro Four Thirds, Samsung’s NX system required a new lens mount – the logically named ‘NX’. With no mirror, the distance between the rear of the NX lenses and the camera’s sensor (the flange depth) is much shorter than that on a conventional DSLR. This also helps to reduce the size of lenses, but it also means that the NX10 can offer another interesting feature.
As the flange depth is shorter, it is easier to produce mount adapters that allow third-party lenses to be used on the NX10. By creating a mount adapter, which is similar to a small extension tube, third-party lenses can be mounted without losing the ability to focus to infinity. This same lack of a mirror box by-product has also helped the popularity of Micro Four Thirds cameras.
Samsung has itself said that it will introduce a Pentax K-mount adapter that will allow the use of compatible lenses. Novoflex has also launched no fewer than 12 lens adapters for the NX mount, including those for Nikon, Canon, Minolta/Sony and Pentax lenses. There are even Hasselblad, Contax and M42 adapters. Sadly, there is currently no Leica M adapter available, but I would imagine this will be resolved in the not-too-distant future.
So, although much of the marketing of the NX10 will be aimed at photographers looking to progress from a compact or bridge camera, it may actually be of more interest to those who are looking for a secondary camera to accompany an existing DSLR system.
Unlike the Olympus Pen range of cameras, the Samsung NX10 does not have in-camera image stabilisation. Instead, Samsung will use optical lens stabilisation in some of its lenses. So far, the optical stabilisation features in the two zoom lenses but not in the 30mm pancake lens.
As the sensor is exposed when lenses are changed, it is very important that the Samsung NX10 features in-camera sensor cleaning. When there is dust on the sensor it is clearly noticeable in the Live View image shown on the rear screen, particularly when the depth of field preview is used. I noticed a large dust particle while I was taking measurements from a grey card. I only had to use the in-camera cleaning function once to shift the dust off the sensor and I then set the sensor cleaning to take place every time the camera was switched on.
Features in use: ASP-C-sized sensor
Samsung’s NX system is the first interchangeable-lens, mirrorless, hybrid camera system that offers a real alternative to the Micro Four Thirds system of Panasonic and Olympus.
The NX system uses the more common APS-C sensor size, which is larger than the Four Thirds-size sensor currently found in rival cameras.
In fact, the 14.6-millon-pixel sensor of the NX10 is designed and manufactured by Samsung, having evolved out of the sensor originally used in the Samsung GX-20, Pentax K20D and Pentax K-7.
When we originally tested these cameras we were impressed with the amount of detail they were capable of resolving, and the NX10 continues this trend. The JPEG image (above ) was taken at ISO 100 and had the slightest touch of Unsharp Mask applied in Photoshop. It reveals an impressive amount of detail in the final image.
Build and handling
The first thing you notice about the Samsung NX10 is how small it is. Compared to the Panasonic Lumix DMC-G1, the NX10 is also just over 100g lighter with a shallower handgrip.
Most importantly, the camera’s body is extremely well built and solid. Impressively, given its size and price in comparison to the Olympus Pen range of cameras, the NX10 includes a built-in electronic viewfinder and a built-in pop-up flash.
This makes the NX10 feel very much like a miniature DSLR, perhaps even more so than the Panasonic G range of cameras.
The control layout of the NX10 is typical of a DSLR, with the only deviation being the positioning of the control dial. You would usually expect this dial to be on the front of the camera below the shutter button, but on the NX10 it appears on top of the camera behind the shutter-release button.
At first, whenever I went to change the aperture or shutter speed, I found that my forefinger defaulted to the front of the camera, but it wasn’t long before I became used to the placement of the dial on the top of the camera.
In fact, there is a good reason for the dial being where it is: given the small size of the camera, it would have been a little awkward to fit the dial onto the front and still make it comfortable to use.
Changing the exposure and image settings is also very fast and easy to do. The metering, focusing, white balance and sensitivity settings can all be accessed via shortcut buttons on the rear of the camera.
Image style is also accessed via a shortcut button, which is very useful, because when it comes to assigning shortcut buttons this oft-changed setting is commonly overlooked by manufacturers. To help those who are already familiar with Samsung compact and DSLR cameras, Samsung has continued to call the image-adjustment options the Picture Wizard. When using Picture Wizard, changing the colour, contrast and sharpness settings are made all the better by the bright and well-laid-out on-screen menu.
In fact, Samsung has put a lot of effort into making sure the on-screen menu and settings displays aren’t just simple lists of features. The simple but sleek iconography, and the colour scheme, combined with the excellent 3in AMOLED screen (more on this later), help to make the NX10 very intuitive and easy to use, regardless of whether you are used to compact cameras or DSLRs.
As Samsung is aiming the NX10 at those upgrading from compact cameras, it lacks many of the custom settings you would typically find on a DSLR. In fact, most of the custom settings have very little to do with adjusting images or how the camera operates, although there are a few adjustments that can be made to the User Display, such as the option to turn the live histogram on or off and to choose one of four different grid display overlays. One extremely user-friendly feature is the preview button on the front of the camera. This button can be changed to do more than just display an optical preview, which is similar to a traditional depth of field preview but with the advantage that the screen adjusts to the level of light. An alternative use for this button is to select One Touch White Balance. This works by pressing the preview button with the camera pointed at a neutral-coloured subject, and then pressing the shutter. As the name suggests, it is a much faster way of setting a custom white balance than accessing the white balance menu.
White balance and colour
The NX10’s colour reproduction was very good throughout the test. In its daylight and automatic white balance settings the white balance is relatively neutral, and the tungsten setting performs extremely well and produces a nice neutral tone.Setting a custom white balance, by taking a reading from a grey card, also results in completely neutral images, with each of the red, green and blue channels measuring exactly the same density. Adjusting the image colour settings via the Picture Wizard menu is simple, and there is a wide range of preset options available. Of these settings I found the Vivid and Black & White options particularly effective.
There are also three custom image style banks available in the Picture Wizard menu, which allow you to store three of your own image settings – something I found particularly useful for achieving a washed-out colour effect when shooting video footage.
Metering
There are three metering modes available in the Samsung NX10: multi, centreweighted and spot. Of these, most users will probably leave the camera in its multi-segment metering mode, which measures the level of brightness across an entire scene and sets the exposure according to the conditions.
I found that the Samsung NX10 produces quite a ‘standard’ exposure when in multi-metering mode. By this I mean it produces the results you would expect. For example, I found that if I had a large shaded area, the NX10 would try to lighten this area, but this would cause some areas in the sky to burn out. Conversely, the foreground in images that contained a large expanse of bright sky was a few stops too dark, although detail in the sky was retained.
This makes it very easy when using the camera to know how the evaluative multi-metering will react in most scenes. In turn, this makes it easy to dial in the correct amount of exposure compensation when you are photographing certain scenes.The exposure compensation is also linked to the Live View display, which is a definite advantage over film cameras. While this preview isn’t 100% accurate and obviously depends on the screen’s brightness level, it does give a better idea of how the final exposure will look.
When a trickier scene is encountered, or to make sure a particular part of a scene is correctly exposed, spot metering is a better option than multi-metering. I photographed a grey card in spot metering mode and then used Photoshop to measure the density of the RGB channels. Each one measured 128 on a scale of 0-255, so the Samsung NX10 measures an exact midtone.
On the whole, I found that the NX10 produces well-exposed images, and when presented with more difficult scenes it was simple to adjust the exposure accordingly.
Autofocus
Like compact and Micro Four Thirds cameras, the Samsung NX10 relies on contrast-detection AF to focus its lenses. It does this by shifting focus back and forth until it detects the point of most contrast.
For example, imagine a black box and a white box placed side by side. If the image is out of focus, a grey blur will be seen where the two boxes meet, with little contrast between them. As the lens focuses, the boxes will become sharper, creating more contrast between the two boxes. The camera will then go slightly beyond this point and will detect when the contrast begins to decrease. It then snaps back to the point of peak contrast, and the image will then be in focus.
The contrast-detection AF in the NX10 works very well, and given a static object the lens locks on quickly. It struggles a little in low light, but thankfully there is a green AF assist beam that provides enough light for focus to be achieved.
Although continuous focus is available, most photographers would be better off leaving the NX10 in single AF mode. While the NX10 is clearly not designed to photograph fast-moving objects, the continuous focus can cope with people walking or moving at a moderate speed.
Manual focusing is very good. Like the Panasonic and Olympus Micro Four Thirds cameras, switching to manual focus and turning the camera’s focus ring magnifies the image in the viewfinder or on the rear screen. This makes it possible to focus with a high degree of precision, and I found that it is actually easier to focus manually using the EVF of the Samsung NX10 than it is using the optical viewfinders of many DSLRs.
Image: Although the contrast-detection AF is not designed for taking images of moving subjects, with careful pre-focusing and timing it is possible to capture moderately fast movement.
Resolution, noise and sensitivity
Image: These images show 72ppi sections of images of a resolution chart, captured using matching 105mm macro lenses. We show the section of the resolution chart where the camera starts to fail to reproduce the lines separately. The higher the number visible in these images, the better the camera’s detail resolution is at the specified sensitivity setting.
As it features a 14.6-million-pixel sensor, you would expect the Samsung NX10 to perform well in our resolution chart test, and it did, reaching past 24 when shooting at ISO 100 and 200.
Of course, the in-camera noise reduction does reduce the amount of detail in JPEG images as the sensitivity increases, but at ISO 3200 the NX10 is still able to reach up to around 18 on our chart. This is impressive and is as good, if not better than many DSLRs with similar resolutions.
What is very impressive is that colour noise is extremely well controlled in JPEG files; there is barely any colour noise visible even when the image brightness is dramatically increased. Obviously, noise is more visible in raw files throughout the sensitivity range, but this is easily reduced using the comprehensive settings that can be found in the bundled Samsung raw software.
By leaving some luminance noise in the image, the amount of detail that can be resolved is improved, particularly at higher sensitivities. It would have been useful if Samsung had allowed the user to select the level of noise reduction in JPEG files rather than just providing simple on or off options.
Another issue is the presence of curvilinear lens distortion in both the kit and pancake lenses. This isn’t really noticeable when shooting natural scenes, but it does become an issue when shooting architectural images. I hope that Samsung will release a firmware update in the future to combat this distortion issue in the camera body software.
Dynamic range
The 11.5EV dynamic range is wide enough to produce nicely balanced exposures in most scenes. When shooting at ISO 100, the images could be lightened quite dramatically to reveal a lot of detail, but without introducing noise. This is great for recovering detail and for fans of producing pseudo-HDR images from the same original file.
This graph shows the brightness values recorded by the test camera when it is used to photograph a stepped graduation wedge. The wedge has transmission values in 1⁄2EV steps ranging from 0 to 12EV. The camera’s exposure is set so the 12EV section in the wedge has a brightness value of 255. Software analysis of the image then determines the recorded brightness values of all the other steps and calculates the camera’s dynamic range.
Image: The dynamic range and low noise levels of the NX10 are impressive. This JPEG image was lightened in Adobe Camera Raw by the equivalent of +4EV, revealing a great deal of hidden detail.
Viewfinder, LCD, liveview and video
Built-in flash
The NX10’s pop-up flash has a guide number of 11m @ IS0 100
Eye sensor
Rather cleverly, this small sensor detects when the viewfinder is held to your eye and then automatically turns the screen off and the EVF on. It then switches back when the camera is no longer held to your eye.
AMOLED screen
Samsung claims that the 3in AMOLED screen of the NX10 uses less power and is brighter than a conventional LCD screen.
Picture Wizard button
In image mode, the Delete button actually doubles up as the Picture Wizard button, allowing quick access to the various image styles.
Software
The NX10 comes supplied with Samsung Master and Samsung Raw convertor software. The first of these is for basic image browsing and editing, while the latter is a rebadged version of Silkypix Developer for editing the SRW raw files produced by the NX10.
HDMI
The NX10 can be connected to a television or monitor via the camera’s HDMI socket. Those with a compatible Samsung Anynet+ televisions can even control the playback of images on the camera via their TV remote control.
Beauty Shot
For those who regularly take portraits, Samsung’s Beauty Shot feature may be of particular interest. It detects skin tones in an image and then lightens and smooths them for more flattering portraits. The effect can be applied either when the image is taken or to a saved image.
Lens distortion
Both the 18-45mm kit lens and the 30mm pancake lens suffer from slight curvilinear distortion. This is currently not corrected in-camera for JPEG files, although raw files can be corrected using the supplied Samsung Raw convertor software.
As it has no mirror box or SLR mechanism, the Samsung NX10 relies on an electronic viewfinder. Many people were put off these viewfinders thanks to the first generation of bridge cameras that had low-resolution EVFs with poor refresh rates. However, technology has now moved on and the screens used in contemporary EVFs have far higher resolutions with better refresh rates. Some EVFs, such as the one on the NX10, even have certain advantages over optical viewfinders.
For starters, all EVFs should be able to display a 100% view of a scene. The Live View system will preview through the viewfinder how the image will look with the current exposure and colour settings applied. The NX10 will also detect when you hold the camera to your eye, and switch from the Live View being displayed on the rear screen to the EVF.
One thing I find particularly useful is the fact that the image can be magnified in the viewfinder for precise focusing, which is something that can be difficult on small SLRs with equally small and dim viewfinders. When shooting in manual mode, a quick turn of the focus ring of the lens activates this magnified preview. If you don’t touch the focus ring for a few seconds, the view reverts to its full-frame mode so the image can be composed. In all, I found the 921,000-dot Samsung NX10 electronic viewfinder one of the most natural to use.
Samsung is currently leading the way when it comes to the manufacture of active matrix organic light emitting diode (AMOLED) displays. These screens have a higher refresh rate, consume less power (as they don’t require a backlight) and are generally brighter than traditional LCD units.
The NX10 has a 3in AMOLED screen made up of 614,000 dots. This isn’t quite as many as used in the current 3in screens of high-end enthusiast and professional DSLR models, but the screen’s high-contrast ratio and brightness make up for it. In subdued lighting the screen looks bright with an excellent level of contrast. In bright sunlight the screen is also very good, although in terms of visibility it wasn’t a great deal better than most other screens currently available.
For those who also like to shoot moving images, the NX10 can capture HD video and the maximum 1280×720-pixel resolution at 30fps capture is very good. Sound is only captured in mono, with a maximum video recording time of 25 minutes for a single clip, but you can apply any of the Picture Wizard colour settings to video footage while shooting. There is even the option to perform basic video ‘trimming’ to edit the start and end points of captured videos.
Our verdict
It is always a brave decision to launch a new camera system, but I think that the NX10 and NX system have a bright future. The adoption of an APS-C-sized sensor will appeal to those demanding the quality of a DSLR camera in a compact design.
The three lenses available for the NX10 at its launch should cover most entry-level photographers’ needs, but with Samsung hoping to launch five new lenses this year, the system may also appeal to more experienced photographers used to SLR systems. The compact 20-50mm, 20mm pancake, 60mm macro and 18-200mm superzoom lenses should offer something for everyone, and all these optics and an NX10 should fit into a small shoulder bag.
What I like best about the NX10 is that it’s a lot of fun. It’s small enough to take out when a DSLR might otherwise be too cumbersome. For example, I took it out mountain biking and barely noticed I had it with me, but it is equally capable of being a fantastic little studio camera for portraits or still-life shots.I’m sure other manufacturers will be introducing hybrid cameras with APS-C-size sensors in the coming years, but for now the Samsung has stolen a march on all of them and come up with a real competitor to the Panasonic and Olympus Micro Four Thirds cameras.
The competition
The only direct competition for the Samsung NX10 currently comes from the Micro Four Thirds cameras. With video capture, built-in flash and an EVF, the recently announced Panasonic Lumix DMC-G10 looks to be the closest match to the Samsung NX10, although it sports a smaller 12.1-million-pixel Four Thirds sensor. The more advanced Panasonic Lumix DMC-G2 will also offer competition, although it is expected to cost more.
In contrast, the Olympus Pen E-PL2 has no EVF, but it does carry a pop-up flash and is capable of video capture.
The NX10 is the cheapest of all four cameras, with a street price of just over £500. This includes the optically stabilised kit lens, but a non-stabilised version of this lens will soon be released, which could bring the price down even further.
