Samsung NX10

Buttons & Dials

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.

Picture Wizard

The NX10 offers a set of nine ‘picture wizard’ settings, which affect color, saturation, sharpness and contrast, as shown in the samples below.

Each of the preset picture wizards plus three Custom settings can be adjusted in four ways: color, saturation, sharpness and contrast. This is particularly good news given the mediocre color accuracy performance we found in our lab testing, with consistent oversaturation. By simply knocking saturation down a notch or two, results improve noticeably.

The 20 color settings basically add tint effects to the image. Saturation, sharpness and control each offer 9 settings. As with other adjustments, the adjustments you make are previewed live on the screen but, given the amount of text, it isn’t easy to see the changes.

There’s a bracketing option for picture wizard settings. You select three of the available picture wizard options. Like the white balance bracketing system, the camera takes one shot and saves three versions, with the specified effects applied. We can see situations where this capability could prove useful, producing three different looks with no extra effort on your part.

Picture Effect Samples
Standard Vivid Portrait Landscape Forest Retro Cool Calm Classic More...

In-Camera Editing

There are a handful of photo editing options. You can save a reduced-resolution copy of a photo, trim to one of the eleven image magnification settings, and rotate photos. There’s an automatic red-eye fix, and a face retouch option with four layers of digital spackling. The backlight option is a heavy-handed attempt to bring up detail in dark surroundings. It does indeed make the dark areas more visible, but knocks the contrast down dramatically in the process. If there were intensity settings available, this would be a much more usable tool.

Finally, there are seven picture styles, related but not identical to the picture wizard options used during shooting, that alter the color tones of an image. Again, the effects are intense and there’s no user adjustment that might make them more useful. There is something intriguing about the decision to name one of these filters ‘Gloomy,’ though.

During movie playback, simply pressing downward with the four-way controller captures a still image. We like this convenient feature, but it would be even better if you could move frame by frame through your video, to choose just the right moment for the capture. In-camera video trimming is also available, a nice way to remove the jostling that often occurs when you hit the shutter to start or stop recording. Your trimmed version is saved as a separate file.

Menu

The NX10 offers a decent quick menu system while shooting, which includes settings for photo size and quality, autofocus area, flash control, color space and smart range (i.e., dynamic range adjustment). For lenses without an optical image stabilization switch on the barrel but with the feature, OIS is also controlled from here.

Pressing the MENU button brings up the traditional in-depth menu system, which is relatively short and sweet. Each of the seven tabs is a self-contained unit, so you don’t have to scroll down to find hidden settings. Of course. one reason for the lack of clutter is the limited number of available customization options.

The quick menu screen.	The main menu system is easy to use.

Instruction Manual

The NX10 ships with an 88 page Quick Start Manual, in English and Spanish, and the full 125-page user manual on CD-ROM. For a more complex camera, the lack of a full printed manual would bug us more profoundly. In this case, while we prefer having a printed manual that can be carried for reference without lugging along a laptop, bookmarked and scribbled upon, it’s less mission-critical than for a high-end SLR. A pdf-format copy of the manual can be downloaded from the Samsung support site by clicking here.

Unfortunately, the manual has some flaws, perhaps caused by a budgetary decision to save on hiring an English-speaking proofreader and just run the thing through spellcheck. Here’s a favorite phrase plucked from the movie recording instructions on page 48: ‘When changing the shooting angle of camera is suddenly changed while in shooting a movie, it may not be possible to take the images accurately.’ Clear as mud, and far from unique. The manual also contradicts itself on the question of whether or not the standard-def video cable is included with the camera (it isn’t, more’s the pity).

Meanwhile, back on the camera, there’s a built-in help function, accessed by pressing and holding the DISP button while in the menu system. It’s a nice idea, but the text that’s accessed lacks enough detail to be really useful.