New NX camera feature suggestions (and some praise)
Aug 5, 2014
3
Skip to SUGGESTIONS if you are a tl;dr; type of person
Hi, all. Having started with a Sony bridge camera, then moving onto an entry level DSLR (Sony A100), then to a mid range DSLR (Sony A700), then getting tired of the bulk and trying a compact (Sony HX20V) and being unhappy with the image quality I decided to try out a CSC.
As you can see I was loyal to Sony for a long time, but somehow the NEX series didn't quite click - the price was high, the handling seemed a little off and, worst of all, despite all those reviews in my tests the image quality wasn't that impressive (even on the A6000 which I handled in a store).
Just looking around I came up to a Samsung stand and was just blown away by the ease of use, speed and image quality of the NX cameras.
Changing systems is always a little hard, but seeing the NX2000 for 199 euros was all the incentive I needed. Man, do I NOT regret that decision. The handling on it is a blast for someone who's been using smartphones and tablets for a good while. While most reviewers lament the lack of physical buttons I don't see the big deal - everything is super quick with the touch screen, but if that's not enough you can just push in the dial to pick and option and adjust it on the fly. The fact that the avilable options intelligently change depending on the mode is just neat. In general - hats off to the engineers who built this - you can see there's plenty of thought put into it and most things are right there at your fingertips (literally!).
The image quality with RAW is excellent for most regular uses. The sharpness still blows me away with the kit lens (actually it seems easily comparable to the A700 - and that's pixel peeping with nearly twice the MP).
Still, of course, there's always room for improvement and I have been noting down some ideas. Being unable to find any real feedback area on any Samsung websites I decided to post these here and hope that someone from Samsung sees it and/or see what others think about it (hopefully for future firmwares AND cameras).
SUGGESTIONS:
RAW support for all the wifi applications
Remote Viewfinder, Auto backup, Email, etc. This is just crucial - I don't care if it cannot be viewed on the phone or tablet, just save it and let the user decide (since if you are interested in working RAW you'll find a way - Photo Mate ftw).
Longer shutter speed for timelapse
It is awesome having the 5x, 10x and 20x video modes, but it would be even better if it was possible to have shutter speed that goes beyond the current limit of 1/30. Would make for some amazing night timelapse. The best would be just having it make every frame whatever shutter speed you set, but if not, just raise the limit to whatever is appropriate to the current speed (so at 20x it would be 625ms, if my math is correct).
Larger level display
The level display is great to have, it certainly helps, but it would be even greater if it was basically full screen. More detail, more precision = better results.
Combined screen guides
Having a rule of thirds is great... but so is a cross... or an X. How about having primary and secondary guides. Primary being at full opacity and secondary at, say, 50%. So you pick rule of thirds for primary and cross for secondary and have a really neat combined guide that suits your style of shooting.
Faster/dismissable messages
It would be great if the notifications didn't linger for so long, which currently is about 3 seconds. Either 1.5 seconds or tap to dismiss would be rather nice.
Shortcut turn on buttons
Certain cameras have this really neat feature (I have seen it on Sony and Fuji compact cameras) where you can access certain functions from a turned off state by holding the button longer. For example image review - you just hold the play button for a bit, the camera turns on and goes straight into playback, without waking up the other functions. Much faster and very convenient.
For NX cameras the directlink button could do the same, but go into the wifi menu.
Smooth light trail mode
Light trails are great! But they are a little less great when you had a hard time judging the time and your exposure stopped as the object with the lights was right in the middle of the frame. Now you have that weird suddenly stopping light trail.
IDEA: How about a mode that smoothly ramps up the exposure and then ramps it down? Basically I guess it would adjust the sensor sensitivity from 0 to 1 (in the middle of the exposure) and back to 0 (at the end of the exposure) and could do it with a nice ramp instead of a linear progression. You would get these light trails that just nicely fade in and out. This would be a really neat feature.
More to come, I suspect.
