Using NX1000 with legacy lens

Walt_A wrote:

Hi, I currently use a Panasonic GF2 with an adapter and my pentax FA100 macro lens as a quick access macro solution while walking around with my Pentax DSLR which has a 300 F4.5 mounted. The panasonic is nice and light and small enough to fit in the bag with the lens connected and the larger DSLR beside it. I was looking at upgrading to a Panasonic GX1 but the NX1000 seems to be a good option being lighter and as small as the gf2. My issue is that I do not use af lenses at all, that's what my dslr is for, and I use the magnified view on the lcd for exact manual focus, this is good on the gf2 (and on my recent DSLR's), but when I was looking at the NX10 a few years ago the problem was that the manual focus solution was not very good, low magnification, low resolution on screen magnification. Are there any legacy lens users out there that want to comment on how good/bad the NX1000 is at manual focus with legacy lenses? (I'm not that interested in those who use manual af with samsung NX lenses as I expect this works differently i.e. auto magnification etc).

I will try to answer most of this and hopefully others will fill in the gaps.  Firstly, the only difference between MF with legacy lenses and with native NX lenses is that with adapted lenses you have to press the ok button to initiate focus assist whereas with native lenses it kicks in automatically as soon as you start turning the focus ring.  The focus assist options and operation are otherwise identical.

The NX10 only had an option of 2x magnification for manual focus assist.  The NX11 and NX100 added an alternative option of a focus assist bar.  It is like a bar graph that gets higher the closer you get to perfect focus.

Later models introduced higher magnification.  With the NX1000 and NX1100, you have the choice of 5x or 8x magnification or the focus assist bar.  Personally I think they should have also retained 2x magnification.  However I am not the best person to answer this because I prefer not to use magnification.  Despite having poor eyesight, I have no trouble manual focusing my Takumars at normal screen resolution.  Perhaps that comes from years of practice with manual focus Pentax film cameras.

The NX1000 and NX1100 have screen resolutions of 921,000 dots compared to 460,000 for the GF2.  Even the NX10 had a screen resolution of 614,000 pixels and, since it was an amoled pentile RGB array, that was equivalent to 921K dots.   Its evf was again 921K dots but seemed worse because of its poor contrast.  For faster refresh, the NX10 used a lower resolution in shooting mode than in review mode which explains why the screen was less impressive than the specs. indicate.

At any rate, I think you can expect to see a substantial improvement with the NX1000 compared to the GF2.

Can the NX1000 be used in aperture mode and auto/manual ISO with these old lenses (and if so what shutter speed is set if I use the supplied flash?) or does one have to use manual exposure?

You can use either M (manual) or A (aperture priority) modes with adapted lenses and can certainly use auto or manual iso in A mode.  I've never used flash with legacy lenses so I can't answer the rest of the question but even with native lenses the shutter speed with flash is not necessarily the max sync speed of 1/180th.  I don't know what algorithm the camera uses to choose the shutter speed when flash is used other than that it is related to aperture and iso and of course the lighting conditions.

If manual exposure does the screen auto brighten if using the flash, i.e. my GF2 can be set to manual and underexposure with the flash providing the lighting but the screen brightens up so I can see it even though it would be underexposed without the flash. (My dslr doesn't do this in manual mode even with flash on it will not brighten up the live view, and is very very annoying becoming unusable in some situations).

For NX, that is called framing mode.  It wasn't available on the NX10 but all subsequent models have it.   You just need to enable framing mode in the menu.  It is off by default.