Samsung Galaxy NX - Hands on

[Rajan Kanagasabai]

Hands on with a Samsung Galaxy NX

A cousin landed in from the USA today and had with her a Galaxy NX camera. I did play around with it for a few hours today and here are my views on the same.

It looks large. I placed it next to my 5D M II and with the 5D M III, it is slightly wider and taller, but width wise it is short. The rear is completely taken over by the mammoth 4.77 inch screen which carries the same resolution as a Galaxy S3 (1280 x 720) which is almost a 2800 dot resolution – maybe a lot better than any other camera in the line today.

(I'm not able to load the images for some strange reason)

It runs the Android Jelly bean OS (ver 4.2) and does pretty much what a smart phone with that OS can do, which includes mail, games etc, but mails on this is a joke for anything more than a line of typing will test your patience. There is a special application that controls the operations of the camera, which is quite easy to use.

At the heart of the device is a 20.3MP APS-C sensor along with a DRIMe IV Image Signal Processor with a crop factor of 1.54x which means the 18-55mm kit lens works like a 28-85mm equivalent.

The connectivity is impressive with a plethora of options. The first option is the Wi-Fi, the second a 802.11n , but for connectivity on the go, it needs a SIM and a data package, which in turn supports 3G and when it becomes available LTE 4G for fast speeds.

When connected the Galaxy NX backs up every shot to a Dropbox, which comes bundled with a 2 year 50GB account. Video mode is 1920 x 1080 at 30fps, or 60fps if you drop down to 1280 x 720.

The device offers an imposing range of ISO, which peaks at 25,600 but I found the shots on it very decent until and upto 2000 after which it the grains started to show

Samsung Galaxy Camera NX key features
20.3MP APS-C CMOS sensor (same as NX300)
18-55mm F3.5-5.6 kit lens
ISO 100-25600
4.8-inch 921K LCD with capacitive touchscreen with Gorilla Glass
SVGA electronic viewfinder with diopter control
JPEG, RAW, RAW+JPEG capture
Movies 1920x1080@30fps, 1280x720@60fps
Built-in GPS +GLONASS (A-GPS supported)
16GB Memory, 2GB RAM
MicroSD card slot supports up to 64GB
1.6GHz Quad-core processor
DRIMe IV imaging processor
Android 4.2 (Jelly Bean)
4360mAh battery
Enhanced voice commands
Advanced Hybrid Autofocus: 105 points on-chip phase-detect; 247-point contrast-detect
Focus peaking
WiFi a/b/g/n 2.4GHz, 5GHz
Bluetooth 4.0 (LE)
NFC
4G LTE/3G HSPA+42Mbps cellular data
Bundled with Adobe Lightroom
1/6000 second top shutter speed
8.6 fps

My cousin also had an interesting device called the Fotodiox EOS-Samsung NX Lens adapter

This actually allows the Canon lenses to be mounted on the Samsung body. I reluctantly tried the basic 70-300 Canon lens and it returned a perfect fit. However, like some of the TC’s the Autofocus and a few other functions were a casualty and only manual mode ops were possible.

I’m told it retails over ONE LAKH INR in India. Personally, I would rather spend that kind of money on a Canon body.

[Sabyasachi Patra]

Hi Rajan,
Wonder why you are unable to post images. Please try again. Else mail me.