Samsung NX10 review – With Nice Design and Photo Quality
Thumbs Up:
The Samsung NX10 has an elegant LCD, is smartly designed and this comfy camera is capable to taking great quality pictures.
Thumbs Down:
One of the major issues with Samsung NX10 is its default image settings and it easily could have been better. The camera has some other issues as well like the average EVF, absence of an override EVF eye sensor, average EVF and the raw software for the camera can be infuriating at times.
The Whiz Kid Speaks:
Manufactured by Samsung the NX10 is a Prosumer Digital camera and is priced at $699.00 to $699.99. The camera weighs about 12.5 oz and measures 4.8 x 1.6 x 3.4 inches (W x D x H), and can be carried frequently. The Samsung NX10 has a decent LCD screen measuring 3 inches and is decently bright. The camera is a14.6 megapixel camera with software like Samsung Master, Samsung Raw Converter and Drivers & Utilities.
If you are willing to use the camera with your computer than you will have to have Microsoft Windows 2000, Windows XP or Windows Vista as your operating system as the camera supports these OS only and hence can be a disappointment for the Mac users. The still images taken from the camera are stored in RAW, JPEG and RAW + JPEG image formats into the system. The camera has CMOS type optical sensor and the effective sensor resolution here is of 14,600,000 pixels.
The camera has four flash modes namely: the Fill-in mode, the Flash OFF mode, the Auto mode, the Red-eye reduction mode, the slow synchro and the Rear curtain sync mode. The standard for video compression in here is H.264 – 640 x 480, H.264 – 320 x 240 and H.264 – 1280 x 720, to offer you the best possible quality. One another downside here is that the camera only supports SD Memory Card. But the camera does have five exposure modes: Bulb, Manual, Program, Automatic and Aperture-priority. The White balance here is preset and the camera shoots the digital video in H.264 video compression.
If you are buying the Samsung NX10 then the bundle will come along with Body cap, Eyecup, Shoe cap and Carrying strap. The camera is powered by a 1300 mAh Li-ion battery and has maximum and minimum operating temperatures of 104 °F and 32 °F.
Razzle Dazzle:
With the looks it becomes pretty obvious that the Samsung NX10 is bigger and weighty than some of the other compacts. Despite its plastic body the Samsung NX10 gives a sturdy and comfortable feel in hand and the design makes it comfortable to hold. Although, the positioning of the buttons on the body is a tad congested and offers limited travel. But the overall structure of the camera is smartly planned and even if you are getting out of a point-and-shoot, you won’t find any trouble in finding the settings here.
Inside Dope:
The Samsung NX10 is comparatively heavier and larger in size than many of the other compact cameras without electronic viewfinders (EVF) and at the same time is lesser in size than the entry level dSLRs. The plastic body of Samsung NX10 is well constructed and gives a great feel and comfortable grip to the camera when held in hand. Despite getting such comfortable grip on the body, the operation of camera is tricky and the reason being the flat switches on the camera which gives really confined travel. But the good thing here the layout of the controls and it has been done intelligently and are easy to find even for those who are coming straight from point-and-shoots.
The controls on the camera include a four-way navigation switch with middle OK button, and pressing it brings up metering, white balance, AF/MF alterations (with an emblematic array of options for all) and ISO sensitivity. The middle OK button for the navigation switch lets you pick your focus area (mentioned that you’re in AF selection mode) and in addition to it, you can choose one of the four different sizes for AF area (a really pleasant feature). There is pair of prominent drive mode options in NX10. Even as the camera offers three-frame bracketing, it is capable of supporting up to three stops in either direction, which clearly is enticing if you are HDR enthusiasts. The Samsung NX10 is also capable of bracketing about three set of images with its Picture Wizard settings.
The performance of the camera definitely isn’t the best in class, but the NX10 does respectably well. The camera starts and get ready for its first shot a brisk 0.8 seconds. Though the camera has a decent frame rate, but still shooting from an EVF camera is still a risk and you frequently will miss the shot and hence the provided frame rate here is sort of debatable. Another debatable thing for NX10 is its photo quality and the good new is that after a lot of debate on it we thought that the photos taken from NX10 aren’t all that bad. Although, most of the quality photos were taken shooting raw, but if you are an expert photographer you can change the settings and can do a bit of experimenting with the photo quality.
Like the stills taken from the camera the NX10′s video quality looked decent as well, mentioned that you don’t look too closely. The video shot from the camera are relatively sharp, without any substantial compression relics. In our test on all the three lenses of the camera the result was almost the same and the saddening thing was the fact that they all performed almost similar to their low-priced counterparts for dSLRs.
Nitty Gritty:
The Samsung NX10 has ample drawbacks to keep the camera off the unanimous choice for the people looking for interchangeable-lens cameras. But the camera still has an elegant design and delivers satisfactory performance and considerable pictures.
