Review: Samsung NX1

Review: Samsung NX1

Viewfinder and Rear Screen

The NX1 features a relatively large and very detailed 2.36 million dot OLED electronic viewfinder (EVF). The EVF on the NX1 is one of the finest I’ve had the pleasure to work with, and in my opinion, it is the clearest viewfinder I’ve used. Looking through the finder in good light is gorgeous, with crisp clear images, excellent contrast and color and good brightness. It’s really quite beautiful. In decent to good light, lag is essentially imperceptible and refresh is quick and clear.

The NX1's Rear Screen can tilt up to 90 degrees
The NX1’s Rear Screen can tilt up to 90 degrees

It is a prettier finder than the one in the Fuji X-T1 (which I consider the current top dog in EVFs). However, two things keep it from dethroning the X-T1 as the best EVF in mirrorless cameras. First, It’s not quite as big, and the eye relief isn’t fantastic for eyeglass wearers. I sometimes had to adjust my eye position to clearly see the whole finder, which could be a bit frustrating especially since it isn’t any bigger than a lot of other viewfinders that have better eye relief. And second, when the light levels drop quite a bit, the viewfinder goes from being responsive and low lag to being extremely laggy and slow to refresh. It’s a sharp cutoff too, so one second it’s clear and smooth and when things get just a bit dimmer, the refresh rate drops dramatically. However, the high refresh is maintained in decent indoor light and all outdoor daylight shooting.

The rear 3” tilting touch screen is a 1 million dot rear screen that is equally as brilliant, clear and contrasty as the viewfinder. It’s the best rear screen on any camera that I’ve used. Viewing angles are excellent, images are crisp and vibrant (without going over the top), and the touch panel is responsive and accurate. The only negative I could say is that it is a bit too glossy and reflective, but that’s a very minor nitpick. In all, it’s a phenomenal rear screen.

Autofocus and Performance

The NX1 is fashioned as an action camera, and for the most part it succeeds with distinction, at least compared to the competition in the mirrorless world. The NX1 is quick to start up, fast to operate, writes extremely quickly and has some serious processing power that ensures that you never wait on the camera. The camera also has the fastest full resolution frame rate of any mirrorless camera at 15 frames per second. The buffer is relatively large as well: I was able to rattle off around 20 RAW frames and over 70 JPEGs at the full 15 frame per second high speed burst rate. The buffer writes to the card quickly and can clear the roughly 600MB of data a full burst entails in less than 10 seconds with my 90MB/Sec UHS-I card.

The Firmware 1.2 update also has caused a bug with continuous Normal shooting, as in single shot or manual focus modes, continuous normal seeks to confirm focus after each shot, reducing the frame rate to around 1 frame per second.  While the continuous high mode can be adjusted down from 15 fps, let’s hope this bug is fixed, so that two frame rates remain easily accessible in these focus modes.

The NX1's sensor has 205 phase-detection points for excellent continuous autofocus
The NX1’s sensor has 205 phase-detection points for excellent continuous autofocus

The Autofocus system is a hybrid phase detect (PDAF) and contrast detect (CDAF) system with PDAF pixels spread across almost the entire sensor. Samsung has done a great job with the autofocus on the NX1. In good light, it’s easily among the fastest focusing cameras in the industry, with near instant focus acquisition and equally excellent focus accuracy. As light levels drop, however, the NX1 slows down considerably, with average to slow single shot AF. It’s still certainly usable speed, but it falls behind the low light focus abilities of the competition.

The trend continues for continuous autofocus, but here the NX1 does have its own claim to fame. While I found that the camera doesn’t track focus well in dim light (doing worse on indoor motion than my Fuji X-T1 and my Sony a6000), in good light it sets a new bar for mirrorless cameras. The NX1 can accurately focus continuously on moving subjects during a full 15 frame per second burst, and can do so with great success. On cars moving towards me at approximately 45 miles per hour, the NX1 was able to achieve accurate focus on about 90% of shots at 15 fps. In good light, it’s the best focusing mirrorless camera on the market.

Manual Focus

The NX1’s viewfinder and rear screen are bright and clear, and that does help aid in manually focusing.  The NX1 also has focus peaking available to outline areas in focus, but I found it only activated on areas of high contrast.  The NX1 can also zoom the viewfinder during manual focus, but this is one area where Samsung dropped the ball.  For some reason, you can’t reposition the enlarged window.  It only zooms to the center of the frame, and there’s no way to move that enlarged area. While this doesn’t pose too many problems for static shooting, it can be a real problem when shooting with adapted lenses with people, as often it’s not practical to zoom to focus, then zoom out, recompose and take the photo before the subject moves.  This is something that really needs to be remedied with a firmware update.

Continue: Key Features

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Comments

10 responses to “Review: Samsung NX1”

  1. onphoto.co.uk Avatar

    Excellent review as always.
    One thing either for this or maybe a separate stub article.
    It would nice to see the highlight/shadow recovery side by side with the sony for example.
    to show how much of a difference there is against ETTR

  2. HF Avatar
    HF

    Nice, great camera, great review. A few questions. To properly ETTR the histogram needs to be constructed out of true RAW data. Most camera makers don’t do it. So usually I need to adjust jpg setting to achieve an accurate evaluation, which gives me the opportunity to prevent clipping highlights (using raw digger for uniwb). Is jpg and histogram coupled?
    How accurate is focus peaking? I found it to be not really reliable with the Sony A7ii or XT1 wide open (needed to use focus magnification, but if a movement of the magnification area is not possible it will be difficult).

  3. StockPic Avatar
    StockPic

    Turn off the enlargement area and turn on focus peaking. No need to move an enlarged area around with focus peaking turned on; just peak the area you want focused. Voila.

    1. HF Avatar
      HF

      Depends on its accuracy. So far, I didn’t have one single mirrorless camera with accurate peaking. I needed magnification to double check.

  4. cisco Avatar
    cisco

    I know you aren’t a video guy, but you kind of missed one of the biggest features 120 FPS at full HD for super silky slow mo.

  5. beyond the lights 2014 Avatar

    This site don’t work fine in Opera.

  6. […] on the other hand, appears to be closing up shop.  After releasing the rather incredible NX1 at the end of 2014, Samsung followed it up with a mini-version in the NX500.  Apparently neither […]

  7. Hugo Avatar
    Hugo

    Nice camera. Unfortunately Samsung in many European countries left the camera market because they weren’t able to gather enough market share. Samsung cameras here were dead at birth.

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