Samsung NX200 review

Compact system cameras (CSCs) are big news at the moment, and the NX system is Samsung’s competitor to the likes of Sony’s NEX or Olympus and Panasonic’s Micro Four Thirds. The NX200 marks a significant advance for the NX system, with a brand new 20-megapixel sensor, 7fps continuous shooting, 1080p videos and a sleek design that strikes an excellent balance of form and function.

One of our biggest concerns with the Samsung NX100 was the lack of an integrated flash. For the NX200, Samsung has (like Sony and Olympus) included a small detachable flash unit in the box. It’s not quite as elegant as an integral pop-up flash, but it’s handy to able to take it or leave it depending on where you’re going that day. It sits in a standard hotshoe, and Samsung also sells various more powerful flashguns that support fully automatic exposure. The optional electronic viewfinder has been dropped from the range, though, and the NX200 doesn’t support it.

Another concern with the NX100 was that its kit lens didn’t offer optical stabilisation. The same lens is included in the NX200 kit we reviewed, but it’s also available with an 18-55mm stabilised lens from Jessops for £600 including VAT. It’s not as light or as compact as the 20-50mm lens, but its stabilisation and larger zoom range are well worth the extra £50.

The greatest asset of previous Samsung NX models has been their controls, and the NX200 is no exception. The focus ring on the lens can be reassigned to various other uses via the iFunction button on the barrel, and with a command dial and a wheel encircling the navigation pad, adjusting exposure settings is extremely quick. There are labelled buttons for exposure compensation, ISO speed, drive mode, focus mode and focus point, and a Fn button calls up a grid of other key settings on the 3in screen. A Custom button can be assigned to one-touch manual white balance calibration – an extremely useful feature that’s often buried in a submenu. The menus are responsive and well laid out, and include the ability to set the auto ISO range from 100-200 to 100-3200. The Picture Wizard customisable presets offer effective control over colour and sharpness processing.

Continuous performance is dramatically improved over the NX100. It didn’t quite hit the claimed 7fps speed in our tests, but 6.3fps for 11 frames is a good result. However, rather than slowing once the buffer was full, shooting stopped and the camera was inoperable for 12 seconds while these 11 photos were saved. In RAW mode, 6.3fps shooting lasted for eight frames and took 40 seconds to save. That’s disappointing but hardly surprising – raw files are extremely big at around 47MB each.

An alternative continuous mode ran at 3fps before slowing to 1fps after 12 shots for JPEGs. Yet another mode captured 30 5-megapixel shots at up to 30fps, although the screen was blank during capture. Overall, it’s a flexible collection of burst modes, but we’d have liked a little more buffer memory and a faster processor to save those enormous 20-megapixel photos. General shot-to-shot performance was on the slow side for a CSC, averaging 1.4 seconds, but we’re pleased to report that autofocus speed was up to scratch.

It’s good to see 1080p video recording but this isn’t the best implementation around. The lens’s autofocus motor isn’t optimised for video, and while it tracked subjects accurately, each adjustment resulted in loud whirring noises on the soundtrack. It looks like the camera discards rather than merges pixels from its 20-megapixel sensor to produce the 2-megapixel 1080p frames, as it suffered from aliasing artefacts such as moiré interference – swirling psychedelic patterns that appeared on dense, repeating patterns such as bricks and fabric. Picture noise was relatively high in low light, and the AVC encoder struggled to cope with all the extra information this noise was generating.

Details aren’t always pin-sharp when scrutinised at 100% magnification, but with 20 million pixels to play with, there’s still a huge amount of detail – click to enlarge

The NX200 fared much better in our photo tests. The 20-megapixel resolution is one of the highest we’ve seen, but it wasn’t too much of a challenge for the 20-50mm lens, with sharp focus into the corners of frames. While per-pixel details weren’t quite as crisp as on various other cameras, the huge resolution ensured that this is the best CSC we’ve seen for detail levels. Colours tended towards accuracy rather than flattery on default settings, a good thing we think, and automatic exposures were reliably excellent.

There’s a hint of noise reduction artefacts in this ISO 200 shot, giving the scarf a slightly painted appearance – click to enlarge

The sensor didn’t cope so well in low light, though. Even shady outdoor shots at ISO 200 showed tell-tale signs of noise reduction, which glossed over subtle details. By ISO 1600, subtle details had all but vanished and darker areas of frames exhibited multi-coloured blotches of noise, which we find less easy to ignore than monochrome noise. The Sony NEX-5N produced far cleaner images in low light, with the Samsung at ISO 3200 being broadly equivalent to the Sony at ISO 12800.

Noise reduction is struggling by ISO 3200, with multi-coloured blotches in darker areas of the frame – click to enlarge

This level of noise could have knocked the NX200 out of the running, but while it isn’t a great low-light camera, it does have some other compelling strengths. It excels for details in well-lit environments, and it has the best controls of any CSC we’ve seen to date. The Sony NEX-7 may prove a worthy adversary with its 24-megapixel sensor and three rotary controls, but it costs over £1,000 including VAT.

The NX system currently only includes five lenses, it has the key lengths covered but you currently don’t have the same range of choice available for Micro Four Thirds cameras. However, for landscape photography and general outward-bound types, its accessible controls, big, detailed photos and petite dimensions make a lot of sense. All that said, we still recommend the Sony NEX-5N for the majority of users.