NX30 first impressions

Take all that with a pinch of salt, I'm still getting to know my new camera.

What I like :

- Excellent grip, makes the camera very comfortable to hold

- Very good VF and screen, I use the VF ability to tilt quite often and find it very easy to use "ala Rolleiflex". The screen tends to show a more "punchy" image than reality but I don't mind.

- AF is fast and accurate although I can't quite say that I am getting much faster AF with my NX30 + pancake lenses than with my NX10... the lenses still do their little "pumping dance" before acquiring focus. The 45mm is swift though. Precision and low-light abilities are better.

- The best Auto-ISO implementation I have seen so far where not only can you select a min shutter speed up to high speeds (1/2000s I think... if not 1/4000s) but you can also choose to let the camera decide based on the lens mounted and guess what? It's accurate! The camera really tries to stay at 1.6/focal (for APS-C crop) as much as it can. Cherry on top: you can bias this behaviour to your prefered side by instructing it to choose 1 or two stops faster or slower shutter speeds: brilliant! Exemple: with the 45mm, the speed will try to stay at a minimum of 1/80s by upping the ISO until max ISO is reached. If you select +1, it will stay at 1/160.

- IQ up until ISO 800 (jpeg only... still no computer where I could install LR to play with RAWs).

- Much faster operations all around. No problem even for continuous high speed shots, the camera stays operative as long as you disabled the instant preview and don't push the playback button;

- General ergonomy and button placements if fine and work well for me

- nice HDR capture without too much of a "cartoon" effect and no discernable double edges (so far). Takes some time to do the blending though (1-2 seconds)

- good time-lapse capability, I plan to make use of that soon

What I'm not a fan of:

- high ISO NR... kicks in too fast and greatly smears details in jpegs... there ought to be a much better approach to that given the extremely high level of details the camera is able to push. I do get a nice TMAX3200 look in B&W when pushing above 6400 though...

- battery life... I usually shoot only with EVF and it turns off when my eye is not up to it so I hope to get long battery life but nope, after two hours, battery was down to 40%... I'll get a spare or two in a few weeks.

- some glitches in the electronics: I had a few "freezing", especially when opening the screen when a picture was writing to card (writing light would keep on flashing and I could not get a response from the camera). After getting the battery out, the camera returned to normal functions and the picture were all there on the card...

- AF tracking: works pretty well with the 45mm when just following a subject but if you try to get tracking + multiple shots (with drive set to "low" otherwise it just keeps focus locked at the first pic), I get a meager 1 or 2 fps and frequently loose the subject... my 1DMkIIn still has some use in front of him...

- still trying to figure out what's happening with the "Custom" positions... I chose C1=HDR and C2=ISO25600+B&W but ended up never getting out of HDR when switching from C1 to C2 or even geting back to A mode... ??

Fun thing to try: HDR mode with drive set to "high": garantees to leave you with a "processing" camera for quite some time... if not forever... (think of it as taking 3imgs for each picture at 8 or 9 fps and trying to blend them on the fly...)

There you have it, that's it for now! Happy shooting!