The best small all-around pocket camera

As a professional photographer, I bought this camera as a lightweight pocket holiday camera in the summer of 2015. Five days later, my seven years of son dropped it while running on a fine sand beach. I cleaned the lens and continued to use it almost every holiday until 2021. Of course, I dropped it countless times. But this small workhorse survived every single time with minor scratches.

Finally, the 16-50 kit lens stopped working. I bought 16, 20 and 30mm prime lenses from eBay in 2022 and started to use this as my primary street photography camera. This little thing delivers good quality images with reasonably faster autofocus, decent resolution, and OK high iso performance. I guess in 2023, it's still a desirable camera to me with prime lenses. I used many different camera systems from the film photography era until today. But I must confess that never used something that offers the best price/performance/features camera like Samsung NX3000. This cheap camera deserves every penny I paid. I don't understand why Samsung stopped the production of NX systems. Actually, these were excellent camera systems in a small rangefinder-style body ideal for all-around street and travel photography. I highly recommend NX3000 or the last products ever produced in the NX product line, NX3300 or NX500.

altugo wrote:

As a professional photographer, I bought this camera as a lightweight pocket holiday camera in the summer of 2015. Five days later, my seven years of son dropped it while running on a fine sand beach. I cleaned the lens and continued to use it almost every holiday until 2021. Of course, I dropped it countless times. But this small workhorse survived every single time with minor scratches.

Finally, the 16-50 kit lens stopped working. I bought 16, 20 and 30mm prime lenses from eBay in 2022 and started to use this as my primary street photography camera. This little thing delivers good quality images with reasonably faster autofocus, decent resolution, and OK high iso performance. I guess in 2023, it's still a desirable camera to me with prime lenses. I used many different camera systems from the film photography era until today. But I must confess that never used something that offers the best price/performance/features camera like Samsung NX3000. This cheap camera deserves every penny I paid. I don't understand why Samsung stopped the production of NX systems. Actually, these were excellent camera systems in a small rangefinder-style body ideal for all-around street and travel photography. I highly recommend NX3000 or the last products ever produced in the NX product line, NX3300 or NX500.

Thank you for setting up an account for this user review. Im sure the camera system meant alot to you!

No doubt, Samsung has made the best cameras during its prime time. However these days used gears are increasingly difficult to find. While the kit sets are easy to come buy, but when you go beyond the current collections, it becomes absolute game of waiting to get the gears you wanted. That is why for me I have completely ditched the NX system in favor of SONY E Mount, which is still somehow popular, cheap to acquire, relevant and has huge variety of gears to choose from.

Currently I still use NX-m (NX Mini) as my daily pocket camera. It has similar UI like NX counterparts, compact and produce desirable results. My mini would probably will stay in my pocket years to come by. I also hope you will find joy with your NX3000 and possibly upgrade to NX500 / NX30 / NX1 with comprehensive collection of gears.

Welcome to the Forum!

It's a great camera and I also had a lot of fun with mine! I was looking for something lighter than my dslr to use other than for plane spotting.

The NX3000 delivered IQ and iso performance from APS-C for the price of a premium compact, on a muchh lighter package than dslrs at the time!

Also got an adapter to use a couple of Canon Fd lenses I had, which gave it a special flair. Some of my favourite photos were taken with the 3000, even with the 20-50 basic kit lens. That thing was actually sharper than any of canon's kit lens on that lenght range.

I would only disagree when you say "pocketable". For me that really means you can put it on a jeans/pants/shorts pocket! And it's not the case.

And I would point two negative points: 1 - absence of Focus peaking. That would help big time with the manual lenses! And 2 - absence of an EVF

Finally, I admit mine is kinda on the corner lately, because I tend to choose between real pocketability (the rx100) or not (then I take the RP). I should probably take it back again. Spring is arriving and make it for a good excuse

The NX3000 firmware always seemed less functional to me in comparison to the Linux-based NX300 and NX500 models, maybe due to its less sophisticated M7MU image processor. My main reason for not using the NX3000 actively, however, is that the other two models have AMOLED displays and thus much better LCD preview quality. Also they are not that much larger and heavier. That said, I absolutely love the 3000's combined d-pad + dial element.

Left to right: NX3000, NX300, NX500 bodies

ge0rg wrote:

The NX3000 firmware always seemed less functional to me in comparison to the Linux-based NX300 and NX500 models, maybe due to its less sophisticated M7MU image processor. My main reason for not using the NX3000 actively, however, is that the other two models have AMOLED displays and thus much better LCD preview quality. Also they are not that much larger and heavier. That said, I absolutely love the 3000's combined d-pad + dial element.

Ah yes, the upper models were better cameras overall, no doubt of that!! But at least in BR around 2014-15, they were really on a different price range! The 3000 was found on major sellers for less than half of the price of the upper models! It was being sold for the price of compacts with much smaller sensors, cheaper than the nikon 1 entry level. I don't know if it was aggressive strategy by Samsung, or already reflecting the lower than expected sales.