Samsung NX300 review

I am using the Canon 5D Mark II for 3 years and carrying a bag with lenses through my trips around the world for a top quality photos. A week ago I bought the Samsung NX300 slim and light camera to carry anywhere for street photography with the flipped LCD and was amazed by the quality of the photos with the standard 18-55mm lens - a total cost of $700. I decided to compare the photos quality with the 5D Mark II in various conditions ISO from 100 to 6400 and put it for survey with my friends, they saw the photos with no indication of the camera brand.

About 75% voted for the Samsung NX300 in various conditions, low light, various ISO, day light, color separation, contrast...

Other advantages Samsung NX300 versus Canon 5D Mark II:

Weight - 600gr versus 1600gr with 18-55mm and 24-105mm zoom lens respectively, note - using the Samsung Pancake prime lenses the Samsung weight even less and aperture is 2 or 2.4.

Size - needless to say, overall volume less than half

Very easy to use - touch screen, larger and better Samsung screen, direct access buttons, can do anything either through the touch or the keys/dial.

Price - under 10% of the 5D Mark II price

LCD angle - very important for street photographer, not intimidating, can shoot above a crowd.

Panorama - very nice capability, easy to use

Sport - 10 shoots per second versus 3, but it is limited by the resolution: 7 continuous in RAW, about 20 in Normal JPG. There is also a fast burst mode.

Special night mode with low ISO by taking 5 fast photos and combining for normal intensity.

Remote control with live view on a smart phone using the built-in WiFi, can 'shoot' at birds and other animals by putting the camera inside their premises.

Auto upload of photos to a hosting server for backup (WiFi)

Miniature pop-up flash (5D doesn't not have that you need to carry a bulky flash).

One touch focus anywhere on the frame (LCD)

Full HD video with adaptive focus, 5D focus in video need to be set manually and is very slow.

Manual focus - the NX300 automatically magnifies X5 the focused area when you touch the focus ring, then it immediately reset for the full frame framing.

It is possible to use the Canon lenses with a low cost adaptive ring but need to use manual focus with these.

Can edit the photos on the camera (if you like...) including crop, color, white balance and more

Many other capabilities are similar like AEB bracketing, Preview.

Disadvantages of the NX300

No viewfinder - difficult to monitor the LCD in direct sun light, must put your hand to shade and using the viewfinder is a habit of most photographers that need to get used to a different shooting mode by the screen to get its advantages.

Focus - it is not a real spot like the 5D but rather some small area to focus on

Sometime after power off the camera 'forgets' the previous aperture set-up (probably need to upgrade the firmware soon).

Thx for your review. I have astonished a couple of friends, owners of full frame cameras, with the output from nx300 it's a very underrated camera, especially here on dpr where it's not even getting an official review.

As already said many times, this would be the perfect camera if only it had a larger buffer for raw shooting and an optional evf with high res and dr. I hope both will be solved in future models, perhaps along with an even improved sensor.

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.

Nx300 has on sensor pdaf as well. Not sure when/how it's used, though. I totally agree about the small/slow buffer and about the deficiency of nx300 in sport/action shooting.

Speaking of iq, as already said earlier, I'd really like an image below iso 1600 from whatever ff camera compared to one from nx300 to let me understand where it's actually better since I really can't see that visible difference. If you talk about artifacts, are you referring to jpg only?

I am shooting RAW. As said, the difference is very little. Let's say, APC-S has a little bit noise and its picture is not so smooth and uniform on pixel-to-pixel level even at low ISO settings that makes photos more sensitive for extreme local contrast and sharpness adjustments or, for example NX300 is not so good in shadow details, when needed. I just must be more accurate in post processing.

I just would never say that IQ of NX300 is better than that of 5DII. If 75% of users find NX300 photos better as that of earlier 5DII, I would rather connect it with growing experience of the photographer than with the camera itself.

Yup, I'd just want to be able to see and recognize that difference myself. Being dof, image resolution and fl equal, I challenge anyone to recognize a ff shoot from a nx300 one (or whatever latest gen aps-c camera, like nex, nikon, pentax and fuji) under iso 800/1600. At higher iso you can say which is less noisy, and that's most probably the ff one, but if you postprocess well a nx300 image in lightroom, you can even fool ppl up to iso 3200, I guess.

Based on iso 6400, I'd say nx300 is camera 1. All the other isos are - for me - indistinguishable...

targut, when you comparing of what you'd said here, which lens was on 5D2 and which lens was on NX300?

I'm betting on pretty much you are talking about a 5D2 with 24-105mm EF F4.0L lens (or the old 28-70mm 2.8L), whereby NX300 was with the super cheap 20-50mm or 18-55mm II kit lens.

I have had different lenses on 5DII and my most used combo was 17-40/4 and 135/2. Now I have 16mm, 30mm, 45mm, 60mm, 85mm, 18-55mm and 12-24mm. 12-24mm and 85/1.4 on NX300 build more or less an equivalent to what I have had previously. 12-24 is my travel lens. So I know this stuff quite good from both sides.

I shoot mostly at day light at low ISO, and 5DII still has an edge over NX300 for my opinion, by almost the same nominal resolution. Not much, but I would prefer 5DII if image quality would be an ultimate criterium for me.

However, it is not honest to compare NX300 with a full frame camera even of older generation. NX300 easily wins, for example, over Canon 550D, which I know quite good and have had a chance to compare both.

The comparative pics that the op uploaded are speaking for themselves...could you say which camera is the nx300 and which is the 5dmk2?

This is the normal quality curve: FF and APS-C provide the same quality in 90% of cases. You will pay a lot of money and inconvenience (weight and size) for the remaining 10%.

This is not only gear: to get a really nice landscape photo, you need to get out of bed long before sunrise, drive and walk, freeze, wait, and then probably go home without any photo just because a cloud was there instead of the Sun. This is the price for the remaining 10%.

I understand the reason of this comparison: people want to justify why they do not need to buy something more expensive. People want to know that NX300 is the right choice. Of course it is the right choice! But for me, this need for justification clearly points to GAS.

We do not need to justify anything. You know, Petr Lovigin, after he broke his Sony DSC-R1 and could not repair it anymore, he has got a new full frame Sony RX1. End of the story? No! last week he has found a second hand DSC-R1 and is happy to make his next journey with it.

I hope this little story will help everybody to overcome the the remainders of the GA syndrome eventually, so that everybody will start trying to do the best with his/her NX300, NEX, OMD or whatever

NewForce wrote:

targut wrote:

I have had different lenses on 5DII and my most used combo was 17-40/4 and 135/2. Now I have 16mm, 30mm, 45mm, 60mm, 85mm, 18-55mm and 12-24mm. 12-24mm and 85/1.4 on NX300 build more or less an equivalent to what I have had previously. 12-24 is my travel lens. So I know this stuff quite good from both sides.

Wow.. you've almost bagged in all lenses from Samsung.

I am a fan of decent lenses and tend to select a camera for a lens and not a lens for a camera. This is Samsung which is guilty for producing so many good lenses. 16, 30, and maybe 85mm are really excellent. Others are quite good but they all have been a real bargain, so SCNR, my GAS.

The fact is that I'd like to be able to see the difference in that 10% you mention. Can anybody show me a picture that could not have been taken with aps-c, with of course distinguishable quality?

For the rest I agree, even if you are using too many acronyms I don't follow you on those