Best pancake lens for NX1100?

Kisaha wrote:

It is not wrong, it just ain't macro!

Macro photography is the very close focusing (a bee on a flower) and the reproduction of 1:1 life size ratio images. There are dedicated lenses for such a job, the NX one is the 60mm macro (go check the Samsung website about it, they explain thongs too!).

You can achieve similar results with cheap adapters, which called the macro tubes. What they do, is simply move your lens further from the sensor, but that increases lens magnification of the said lens.

Search on ebay "Fotga macro extension tube for Samsung NX mount", they go from around 20$. Pretty cheap and they can be very exciting if you are not familiat with real macro lenses.

There is another thing you can do now (and maybe zoom in, is better than wide shots) and that is Crop. Because the NX500 has the biggest megapixel count in its segment, you can take a picture, and crop it further, and still have a perfect usable high quality picture. And you can do that for free!

30 is tiny small, 2f apperture, very sharp and you can find for really cheap. It is like a standard lens (the well known 50mm lenses that are so common, that called "the standard") but a bit wider (closer to what the human eye sees, something like that). I believe it is a very good lens for general photography and I use it like this. Sometimes I use the 45mm, which is excellent and fast focusing (30mm is not very fast focusing, and its main disadvantage) but it is 77mm equiv (around there 1.54X45mm= do the math!) so more of a short tele portraite lens, still I do use it for street photography, 30mm is wider. These two lenses are among the NX highlights, cheap, very good performers.

I think that you've answered all my questions.  Thank you very much.  I'll get the 30mm lens.  The price of $250 to $300 is almost as much as I paid for the camera, but it will be worth it if it gives me sharper shots.  I'll try the lens by itself for my macro shots (which really are more like portrait shots than macro shots).  If the images aren't good, I'll get a tube.

I have indeed been cropping all of my shots.

One of the reasons I got the NX1100 is that the color accuracy was better than average (according to one review site).  I didn't know this at first, but camera manufacturers purposely tweak the color reproduction to make it more pleasing, but that's bad if you are shooting colorful products (like the beads that I sell), and you want the colors to be accurate.

Thanks again for all your help.  I'm very grateful.