Samsung NX300 review

Price, specifications and rating based on the 18-55mm kit

Samsung’s NX system has always faced tough competition from other CSCs, such as the Sony NEX, Panasonic G and Olympus PEN ranges. Samsung is clearly determined to make a success of NX, though, and this year its hard work has paid off. The NX300 doesn’t so much excel in any one area, but instead comes at or near the top in virtually every area.

It’s a strikingly handsome camera, with a brushed metal top plate and a leather-textured grip providing some retro chic from the front, while a gorgeous 3.3in articulated AMOLED touchscreen makes it look bang up to date from the back. It’s a little bigger and heavier than the competing Sony NEX-5R, but not significantly so. The only let-down is the blocky plastic design of the detachable flash unit.

It’s a very handsome camera indeed, classic-looking but yet still more modern than retro

The screen is a big improvement over the NX210’s 3in fixed, non-touch-sensitive screen. The downside is that the buttons to the right are a little more cramped, and there’s no longer a wheel encircling the navigation pad. There’s still a command dial on top, though, and the lens-mounted i-Fn button reassigns the focus ring to a range of other duties. The buttons on the back are well thought out, with direct access to ISO speed and drive mode, and the touchscreen makes it quick to move the autofocus point and navigate the quick-access Fn menu. NX cameras have always fared well for controls, and thanks to the large touchscreen, this is the best yet.

A great screen and great controls

The NX300 also scores full marks for features. All the conventional photographic controls that we’d expect are here, as are new-fangled features such as HDR, sweep panorama and creative filters. We’re delighted to find Samsung’s innovative Best Face mode included too. It’s designed for group portrait shots, capturing five frames and letting you choose the best pose for each person before stitching a composite image together. The resolution drops to 6 megapixels and some ghosting can appear along the joins, but it’s one of the most genuinely useful new shooting modes we’ve seen in a long time.

Best Face mode helps to banish blinks and grimaces from group portraits

Not all of the features were quite so impressive. The camera automatically tags portrait-shaped photos for rotation, but they appeared upside down in Windows software. We’re not the only ones to have noticed this, and have enquired to Samsung about what is most likely a firmware issue. We are awaiting a response at present, but it shouldn’t be hard to fix.

WI-FI PHOTOGRAPHY

Wi-Fi is built in, complete with NFC so you don’t have to even enter a Wi-Fi password when connecting to a NFC-enabled smartphone for the first time. Samsung has consolidated various functions into a new Samsung Smart Camera App, available for iOS and Android. This includes wireless transfers, with browsing on either the camera or the smartphone, plus automatic transfers as you shoot. With the app running in the background on our Android smartphone, this made instant online sharing as easy as if we had taken a photo on the phone.

The remote viewfinder mode isn’t quite so impressive, with only basic control from the app and no option to record videos this way. Our modestly powered HTC One V suffered from significant lag for both the remote live view and the shutter release, but the iOS app running on a third-generation iPad was more responsive.

Samsung has neatly integrated all its Wi-Fi features into one app

Photo uploads to Facebook via a home network passed without a hitch, and the touchscreen made light work of entering log-in details. It can also upload photos to Microsoft SkyDrive, but we’re not sure why it needs permission to access our Windows Live contacts and calendar at any time. Video uploads to YouTube are limited to 30 seconds and the lowest 320×240 resolution.

SPEED AND VIDEO

Performance is much improved over previous NX models, with extremely responsive autofocus helping it take a photo every 0.7 seconds in normal use. Continuous mode ran at 8.6fps, slowing to 2.7fps after 14 frames – a superb result. Switching to raw mode took its toll, though, keeping us waiting for two seconds between shots once the six-frame buffer was full.

Previous NX cameras’ videos modes have been held back by chattering noises from the autofocus motor leaking into the soundtrack, but that’s been fixed on the NX300. There’s a much wider choice of frame rates than before, too, ranging from 24 to 60fps at 1080p. Priority and manual exposure work for videos just as they do for photos, and the shutter speed and aperture (but not ISO speed) can be changed while recording. We encountered an odd problem with truncated soundtracks when importing clips into Sony Movie Studio and Vegas Pro editing software, but had no problems with other software. This time we’re looking to Sony to provide an answer.

1080p videos were incredibly sharp, but repeating textures such as bricks and fabric revealed moiré interference, and diagonal lines looked slightly pixelated. Gentle motion such as a flowing river displayed slightly odd motion as details hopped from one pixel to the next. Noise was quite intrusive at fast ISO speeds, too, all of which leads us to suspect that the camera is simply discarding pixels to convert its 20-megapixel sensor output to (2-megapixel) 1080p frames. The best cameras use interpolation to resize the sensor output to avoid these problems. This might put keen videographers off, but we’ve no hesitation in recommending the NX300 for casual videos. The majority of our test clips looked superb.

Videos are seriously sharp, but there are various artefacts that other cameras don’t suffer – note the odd motion in the water half-way up the frame, and also the blocky appearance of the overhead cables – click through to YouTube for 1080p

PHOTO QUALITY

Photo quality showed dramatic improvements too. Whereas the previous generation of NX cameras saw image quality succumb to noise at ISO 3200, the NX300’s output was far cleaner, with respectable results up to ISO 6400. This raises the NX range from the bottom of the CSC pack to near the top for noise levels. The Sony NEX-5R still clung onto a narrow lead, but the difference was only clear at ISO 12800.

JPEGs at ISO 800 show barely any evidence of noise, and colour processing is spot on – click to enlarge

There’s a little grain at ISO 3200, but still plenty of detail. Quality here is good enough to print, and marks a massive improvement for the NX range – click to enlarge[

Image quality is still holding together well at ISO 6400 – it’s good enough for sharing online – click to enlarge[

Only at ISO 12800 does noise take a heavy toll – click to enlarge[

Image quality in brightly lit scenes matched the excellent results of previous NX cameras, with the 20-megapixel sensor and sharp kit lens delivering extremely sharp details, and dense textures were handled superbly.

This shot in direct sunlight is hard to fault – the camera has picked out the detail in the dense vegetation extremely well – click to enlarge[

CONCLUSION

In many respects the NX300 and Sony NEX-5R – our current Best Buy – are very similar. Both excel for image quality, have Wi-Fi built in and come with lots of innovative shooting modes. Both have highly capable video modes, with the Samsung delivering sharper details and the Sony exhibiting less aliasing artefacts and noise. Both have a small but growing selection of lenses available, with all the most important lens types covered. We prefer the Samsung’s more generous allocation of labelled buttons, but both are friendly and quick to use and their performance results are very similar. For us, the Samsung wins hands down for style, but the Sony is slightly smaller. It’s a very tough call to make between the two.

Objectively, it all comes down to price. The NEX-5R is currently available for around £450, which makes the NX300 look expensive at £600 with the 18-55mm kit lens, although Samsung throws in a copy of the excellent Adobe Lightroom 4 to sweeten the deal (worth around £75). It’s also available for £550 with the 20-50mm lens, but this lens lacks optical stabilisation so we’d avoid it.

Today, the NEX-5R is still narrowly our top pick, though if you want Lightroom 4 and more buttons to play with then the NX300 is a fantastic alternative. As prices inevitably drop over the next few months we’ll have to come back and seriously reconsider an award for this great camera.