Samsung NX1 hands-on preview

Samsung’s system cameras just got a lot more serious. The lines between DSLRs and mirrorless system alternatives are gradually being blurred, and it’s down to cameras such as the Samsung NX1.

This is a true high-end system camera for people willing to fork out a fair bit for their photography hobby. The NX1 costs £1300 – and that’s without a lens. It may make you gulp at first – other cameras in the series like the Samsung NX2000 are available for just a couple of hundred quid these days. But look at the specs and you’re actually not getting a bad deal. We had a play with the camera to see what’s it’s like to use ahead of our review.

Meet the beast

That the Samsung NX1 is out to charm photo enthusiasts is obvious from the first moment you clap eyes on the thing. Like a DSLR, it has a chunky handgrip, designed to give you a firm hold even if there’s a lens heavier than a large bag of sugar screwed on.

Construction is top-notch too. The NX1 body is made of magnesium alloy, giving you strength without masses and masses of weight. It still weighs 550g without a lens, but that’s actually not too bad when you consider its size. While a CSC, it’s a chunky little guy. A substantial grip is vital in a camera like this – we think Samsung has got the design right this time.

Weather proofing means you don’t have to play nice with the NX1 either. It’s designed to keep dust out and is splash resistant. Don’t drop it in water, but feel free to use it in the rain.

The camera also offers supremely good manual control. For those who want to pretend Auto mode has never been invented, there can’t be many better system cameras out there. As well as having the control dials needed to let you fiddle with settings without digging through menus, there’s a monochrome LCD display on the top plate that tells you exactly what settings the camera is currently using. Only top-end cameras have these – and it’s the first time we’ve seen one on a CSC.

It may look nerdy, but going the extra mile on features is what the Samsung NX1 is all about. There’s even a lock on the mode dial – seems like a small addition, but a dial that’s too easy to flick over can be monumentally annoying.

READ MORE: Nikon D810 review

My Plug in Baby

It almost has the same connectivity power as a smartphone too. As well as NFC and Wi-Fi, the Samsung NX1 has Bluetooth. Given how much of a pain most cameras make transferring photos over Wi-Fi, this is a great idea. Bluetooth is a bit slower than Wi-Fi, but it isn’t half simpler for transferring just the odd photo.

The NX1 also offers good tools for composing your photos. There’s a Super AMOLED 3-inch screen on the back made up of 1,036k dots and a rather good XGA-red OLED EVF. Like so many of Samsung’s phones, the NX1 is positively OLED obsessed. OLED screens offer superb contrast, but the EVF’s colours did seem a bit over saturated when we tried the camera out. Fingers crossed we’ll be able to tweak this in the final model.

EVFs still aren’t at the level of optical viewfinders in image quality terms, but as far as EVFs go, this one is very good. It’s a great size, making it much more enjoyable to use than the postage stamp-size EVFs of old.

The Samsung NX1 really embraces new tech, and you see this in its core hardware as well as some of the frilly bits around the edges. Two of the most important bits to mention are its video skills and the sensor.

READ MORE: Samsung Galaxy K Zoom review

4K wrinkle-finder

Clearly aiming to take some shine off the Panasonic GH4, whose fab 4K video capture has made it a hit with amateur Spielbergs, the Samsung NX1 offers video capture in both UHD and 4K standards (contrary to popular belief, the two are actually different).

Samsung is also keen to big-up that the camera’s phase detection autofocus will make the picture a bit more stable when refocusing, and that you can send the uncompressed video feed directly to an external recorder over HDMI. This should come in handy for the more serious video freaks out there – 4K video eats away gigabytes of data in no time.

READ MORE: Panasonic Lumix GH4 review

What about the sensor?

This is what really determines the sort of image quality a camera body’s going to come out with. The Samsung NX1 has a 28-megapixel APS-C sensor, but unlike the other NX-series camera, it’s a BSI sensor. This tech is used in phones to provide better low-light performance in the sort of teeny-tiny sensors you get in most mobile phones, but what will it do in a big APS-C one? We don’t know yet, but it’s one of the most exciting things about the Samsung NX1 for the photo purists out there. As long as Samsung hasn’t overdone the noise reduction, we could be in for a real treat.

Elsewhere, the Samsung NX1 has a new DRIMe V imaging engine that offers new noise reduction algorithms that – according to Samsung – are better at telling between fine detail and noise. There’s no low-pass filter, either, which should make photos all the sharper.

There’s more to the Samsung NX1 brain than low-light skills though. You can shoot at up to 15fps at full resolution, with autofocus. That’s very fast indeed – using burst mode fires out a noise that sounds like a tiny machine gun (even if there are no DSLR internals to actually make that noise). ISO range is great, going from 100 all the way up to 25,600, with an extended 51,200 mode available for emergencies. And there’s even a separate green AF assist light for when the lights go really low.

When light conditions are better, the Samsung NX1 is blazingly fast too. It uses a hybrid phase and contrast detection autofocus system, and virtually the whole sensor is covered by phase detection points too. There are 205 phase detection points, including 153 even more accurate cross-type ones. For a compact system camera, this is jaw-to-the-floor stuff.

Samsung says the autofocus takes just 55ms, and it seemed pretty quick to us. But we’ll see whether it can cope past midnight without a night light to keep it company when we get on to the full review.

READ MORE: Sony QX1 review

A mode for every occasion… literally

Of course, this wouldn’t be a Samsung device without a silly-sounding extra or two. And the Samsung NX1’s is Smart Shutter. It’s designed to get you cracking pics in a very specific set of sporting situations: to take a picture just as a baseball player hits the ball, for instance, and to take a shot when someone’s at the very top point of a jump. And that’s it for now. It’s a work-in-progress.

It sounds a bit silly, but the tech that goes into it is quite interesting. The Samsung NX1 assesses the scene at 240fps, so it can take a pic at just the right time. Now all we need is for major league baseball to come to the UK to make it remotely useful.

Initial verdict

The Samsung NX1 is a compact system camera well-equipped enough to attract people away from DSLRs, and not just cheap ones. Its spec cred is really beyond reproach. It doesn’t have bags of style, but that’s not what a camera like this is about. Performance, image quality and control are what matters here.

The control and performance seem to be on the money in the Samsung NX1, but will the image quality live up to those high standards? We’ll have to wait and see. It’s a promising start, though.