Samsung NX300 review

I have had a Canon 5DII earlier and now NX300 too. And indeed, NX300 gives me all that I need in my hobby. However, this review seems to be too much in favor of NX300.

+ Weight and size. This is priority 2 for travel photography, image quality being priority 1. And IQ of NX300 is not much worse. May be on par with 5DII in some cases, but I have always had a little bit better resolution, more accurate details and less artifacts in 5DII. Full frame still has advantage over APS-C. However, the difference is very subtle and IQ of NX300 is good enough for me. I am glad to travel with a lot lighter and more compact gear.

-+ Ease of use. Ergonomics of 5DII is still better (for me), just because I have bigger hands and feel myself better with a bigger camera using two hands hold. From the other side, 5DII cannot do the art of photography that NX300 can: very close near shots the minimum focus distance with one hand completely stretched, shots from floor perspective, shots at weird angles. One must hold a DSLR always at the eye level and that limits our possibilities significantly, for my opinion.

+ Price. Sure, but I do not understand this: "Price - under 10% of the 5D Mark II price"???

+ Tilting LCD. It is a nice feature, but I found myself not very comfortable with it and tend to use the camera without using it most of time.

+- Panorama. I love this feature very much, but its implementation in NX (as well as in other compact systems) is poor. It uses video mode, small resolution, speed and aperture cannot be set and this leads to overexposure too often (one must always start panning from brightest areas). The worst of it are stitching artifacts so that more than 50% of shots have them. I am tempted to get a Sony NEX for sweep panoramas just because people say it is a little bit better in that sense.

- Sport. 10 shots per second is good for a specification but I just believe that the author of the review has never tried to shoot sports with NX300. No matter how 5DII can be bad for sports, NX300 is even worse. It is still an CDAF camera and its focusing speed is not the best even in that segment. In addition, NX300 has a small buffer and still too slow writing files. It is just unusable for sports.

I have never used remote control. One can try to shoot birds and animals remotely but I doubt about success of this exercise.

- Auto upload of photos for backup? The author is probably not aware that all photos are scaled down significantly for upload. This feature may be useful to upload photos into Facebook or Flickr, but never for backup.

- Adaptive focus in video has the same disadvantage of all other CDAF systems: it "pumps" forth and back. If somebody wants a quality video in NX300, must use manual focus anyway.

- This small pop up flash is a very good means to make any photo flat and dead: it is too week and can not be rotated. People who use flash, buy a normal flash for NX system. There are a couple of decent flashes but.. they are bulky too.

- No viewfinder. I miss it in 10% of cases, maybe.

- Focus. It took me too much time to realize the difference between spot focus of an PDAF camera and area focus of a CDAF camera. I have always used a selected spot focus on the 5DII, but now I use mostly area focus selection on NX300 because it is the only reliable way to locate a nearest focus point in the scene. "Spot" focus on CDAF is unreliable, and I am speaking not only about NX300 but also about OMD which have had the best CDAF system until recently. Therefore, I have stopped using the touch focus feature on both cameras, at least when I use lenses with thin DOF.

- Camera resets previous aperture setting after going to sleep mode. As far as I remember, this error was corrected in the latest firmware for NX300.