Large part of reason why Sony escaped with electronic company stigma is acquisition of minolta which made transition of perception much easy. They used sony-minolta name first before decide to drop minolta name after getting user-base. Samsung though follow different approach by form temp partnership with pentax before going its own way. They did not establish user base when they went solo. If they bought pentax, they might have got pentax user base and avoid stigma.
I totally agree. But it also takes a couple of class leading products to get there. I personally believe, among others, the RX100 played a great role for Sony in building their image as a "camera producer". Every single review you look at lists RX100 as the best premium compact in it's era. Mark 2 and 3 carry the same flag as well. So they did come up with a product that became the icon, the "benchmark" in it's class. Very much like Panasonic FZ200...
Samsung, unfortunately, does not seem to prioritize that, although they are more than capable of. They prioritize pushing their Tizen OS (despite being the single handed biggest android device producer in the world) at the cost of condemning their users to next to none developer support and huge firmware updates every time they decide to fix a little bug. They pull PR stunts claiming to be open source, but being "open source" practically amounts to nothing unless they reach the critical mass (certain amount of units sold / in use). They simply have other, bigger plans compared to our "photographer/videographer" concerns...
The best camera I own at the moment is a NX2000 (obviously, I am not a professional photographer). In my humble opinion, it was one of the best purchases I've ever made. Mostly because the kit cost me just $200+s&h
NX2000, by all means, is an utter delight. And it is sad to see this perfect product being highly underestimated (even ridiculed), just because it bears the name "Samsung". But in the end it is up to Samsung to remedy the common misconception, and they don't seem to be doing much about that...
