8 Little Steps To Make The NX1 Perfect - A Firmware Review of Version 1.20

Firmware hangs when calibrating custom white balance in movie standby mode:

After testing the NX1 further, I discovered the following bug:

1. Entering movie standby mode,
2. Pressing the WB button on the drive wheel,
3. Choosing "Custom Set",
4. Pressing the DISP button,

will cause the firmware to hang. The camera will show the current sensor image (still being updated) and a square in the middle of the screen for white balance calibration, but neither pressing the shutter button nor pressing the MENU button nor turning the camera off will show any effect. The only way out of this seems to be taking out the battery.

Beside this bug (which should probably be easy to fix), experimenting more with the movie mode made me notice some more features (see below) that I would particularly find useful but that are missing.

No histogram in video (standby) mode:

It doesn't seem to be possible in video (standby) mode to show a histogram. Pressing the DISP button in video standby mode will only show and hide the icons and buttons. This is particularly sad, because the only way to get a histogram is to switch back to capture mode, which makes you

• lose your focus, as described here (see issue #1, "difficult selection of manual focus mode for movies"), and
• doesn't allow you to see the histogram for a selected "Gamma C" or "Gamma DR" gamma curve (since those gamma curves are only available for video mode).

I haven't stumbled upon this problem earlier. When I started to do some actual video recordings, I figured out that the histogram in video (standby) mode was missing.

FPS selection revisited / 180° video shutter:

I already pointed out in another thread that the NX1 doesn't seem to allow you to record in 60 fps (but only in 59.940 fps, which is not the same, see also here).

Why do I bring the frame rate issue up again?

I would like to record clips with a high frame rate (e.g. 50 fps) while not giving up the ability to later use them in lower frame rate video productions (e.g. 25 fps). Recording my footage with a high frame rate would allow me to do slow motion in post-processing. If, furthermore, the higher frame rate is a multiple of the lower frame rate, then I could integrate the high-fps footage in my low-fps productions without judder.

Considering further that I would like my lower frame rate to be very close to the cinematic feel of 24 fps, the only possible combination of frame rate pairs is 25/50 fps.

So far, so good. But for a low frame rate movie, you usually want a 180° shutter, i.e. if you record at 25 fps, the shutter will usually be something like 1/50s. Choosing a faster shutter will lead to a too "crispy" motion (not enough motion blur).

While the NX1 may record 24, 25, and 29.97 fps videos with a 1/30s shutter, the NX1 will record 50 and 59.94 fps videos only with a shutter speed of 1/60s or faster. Therefore, it is impossible to realize a 180° shutter for 25 fps movies where you use footage that has been recorded at 50 fps with the NX1 (because that footage will have a shutter speed of at least 1/60s).

Setting the camera to 60 fps allows you a shutter of 1/60s, but setting the camera to 50 fps doesn't allow you to select a shutter of 1/50s.

I wonder whether the 1/60s shutter limitation at 50 fps has technical reasons or whether this is a bug? Maybe it's really just a software issue that could be fixed easily?

For the same reason (recording footage in high-fps, and then later integrating it into lower-fps projects), it would be nice if the NX1 supported 48 fps in addition to 50 fps. Maybe someone might call this an "inessential" problem, but selection of the right frame rate is crucial if you want to be able to combine your material with other material or integrate it into a larger project.

If you work on 24 fps video projects, you can't really make use of the higher frame rate capabilities of the Samsung NX without accepting "judder" when downsampling the material.

Since I guess the frame rate is just a software issue(?), I would really like to see frame rates of 30.00, 48.00, and 60.00 fps being made available in a new firmware release, as well as support for a shutter of 1/50s at 48 and 50 fps (reasons stated above).