Samsung NX10

Handling (7.00)

There have been two basic configurations in mirrorless interchangeable-lens camera design so far: those like the Panasonic G1 and GH1 that look like slightly shrunken SLRs, and those like the Olympus E-P1 and the Panasonic GF1 that are more like overgrown point-and-shoots. The NX10 is definitely in the first category, with a straightforward SLR-style design done up small. That’s not much help if your goal is to stuff the camera in your pocket; even with the nifty pancake lens, that’s not going to happen. However, when it comes to maneuvering the camera, the nicely designed front grip and rear thumb rest offer a solid hold that the more compact designs can’t match. We tend toward large hands around here, but found the midsized right grip quite comfortable, while still being accessible to the small-pawed.

Buttons & Dials (8.75)

The camera has a reasonable number of dedicated controls for quick access to frequently changed shooting settings, and the Fn button accesses a quick menu with the remaining major options. There’s also a Green button, used to return camera settings to their default values.

There isn’t a lot of programmability in the control configuration. The button labeled ‘Fn’ is not a programmable function button, as you might expect, but limited to quick menu access while shooting and a menu of editing options during playback. The depth of field preview button, located on the front of the camera, can be set to an alternative function, directly accessing the manual white balance setting, but that’s all she wrote where control customization is concerned.

There is a single control dial, on the top of the camera, directly behind the shutter. This works reasonably well when setting exposure compensation, with the button on the back of the camera and thumb-accessible, but less well when trying to adjust drive mode, which is side by side with the dial.

Display(s) (7.30)

Instead of using conventional LCD technology, Samsung offers a 3-inch AMOLED (active matrix OLED) screen, with a 614,000-dot resolution. It’s a very sharp, good-looking display, particularly for reviewing photos and working with menus. We found the default configuration, with brightness set automatically by the camera, left us flying nearly blind when shooting in bright outdoor light. However, a quick trip to the setup menu let us turn the auto brightness off and crank it up manually (with five available settings). Now we could shoot even in the mid-day sun, though even then we prefer the EVF in the glare of direct sunlight.

The display color can also be finely adjusted, but we didn’t see any reason to change from the default setting.

Secondary Display

There is no separate monochrome LCD panel to display camera settings.

Viewfinder (6.50)

The electronic viewfinder offers approximately 100% coverage, with 0.86x magnification and VGA resolution (921,000 dots). There’s a sensor below the EVF that automatically switches between the viewfinder and the LCD when you hold the camera to your eye. We found the sensor to be a bit finicky when shooting while wearing glasses, and there’s no manual override. Brightness is good, even in dim environments, but there’s a problem keeping up when you move the camera. The display stutters and blurs as you pan and scan, and it doesn’t take particularly fast movement to see this potentially stomach-churning effect.

Image Stabilization (4.46)

The optical image stabilization system didn’t make much difference, but on the plus side it improved rather than hurt sharpness at nearly every shutter speed (IS often impairs results at higher speeds). More on how we test image stabilization.

The Samsung NX10 uses lens-based image stabilization. Of the three initially available lenses, the kit 18-55mm and the 50-200mm telephoto include stabilization, the 30mm pancake does not. Two stabilization modes are available, one which kicks in when the shutter is pressed, the other which is applied continuously. We used the first, which uses less battery power.

In our low shake testing, we found modest resolution gains at most speeds, both when the camera was moving horizontally and when it was moving vertically.

When we cranked up the level of shake to the point you might see if you were moving around while shooting, the improvement is more noticeable, particularly in the range between 1/125 second and 1/60 second.

Image Stabilization Comparison Table			Expand
	Low Shake IS Off	Low Shake IS On	High Shake IS Off	High Shake IS On
1/500
1/250
1/125
1/60
1/30
1/15
1/8

Among our comparison cameras, only the Olympus E-P1, with its in-camera stabilization system, posted particularly strong results here, with the NX10 score about the same as the others in the group.

The following table offers representative same-size crops taken from our test images, to provide a visual demonstration of the sharpness improvement we experienced. These crops are taken from the horizontal shake testing, at both low and high shake levels.