Mr.Blue

Michael, I got my nx1 in June and have really enjoyed it.

I haven't gotten any of the NX lenses, but I do want to get a few of the pancakes.

I've liked this camera coming from the d7100.

My d7100 has served me really well, and continues to do so, but the nx1 just has so many things that the d7100 doesn't that it really is fun to use and really does feel like an upgrade, in terms of features, usability, and footage.

Pretty much all my lenses are Nikon, at least my big prime and zoom set, and they work great on the nx1, although my 11-16 vignettes wider then 13mm or so.

My 7100 had some banding too, mainly in the shadows. It doesn't look good when it shows up, It hasn't been an issue 8 out of 10 times, but when it looks ugly, it looks ugly.

The nx1 hasn't shown anything like that, but I haven't really put it through the low light ringer.

I use Rocky Mountain converter and haven't had any real issues with converting, and recording UHD and converting to 1080 looks gorgeous to me.

One thing I really love about the nx1 is how long the battery lasts in it, even when filming UHD all day, a battery will last me the entire day and only be around half drained. 

I really like this camera and the features you get for the money are incredible. Transcoding the footage has been blown out of proportion, it really isn't that big of a hassle for me.

 

So, the smart range on gives at leas 1/2 stop advantage in the highlights. Fairly useful but hard to say if it's better than underexposing and doing stuff in post (it totally should because this step is done before encoding in camera, not after).

However when shooting in 1080p I noticed a severe lack of detail at iso 400 (not that high) compare to the 640 of the smart range off. I'm still investigating. But I was surprised how bad 1080p looks on nx500. Anything above iso 100 is smeared to hell and blotchy noise also present. Considering my test was static, at 60mbps it should absolutely not be an encoding issue, but very poor processing (unless the processing is really that poor, I mean the stream is formed of one I-frame followed by 11 (ELEVEN) consecutive B-frames. Someone at Samsung forgot about P-frames, 11 consecutive bframes is a serious problem, anything above 2 is only for low movement that is properly dithered).

 

Does anyone have any 1080p NX1 footage at iso 400 to 1000 or so and can upload? I have a feeling the video processing on nx500 is pretty damn bad.

damn thats a great shot ! The flare and the tone of the colors are amazing 

Another re-edit :

I realized, I stopped taking pictures almost completely, and instead use only framegrabs...The quality is simply outstanding, and quite honestly, the gap between photo and video has become so thin, its barely noticeable.

I'm thinking that could be it ! Well Ken Rockwell praises the Canon FD L set I use to be sharp and contrasty (which they are) but idk they have a different characteristic than modern lenses. It's a mystery. But yeah default settings across the board ! I'm going to try to use the standard profiles but with the gamme DR things that looked saturated to my eye were not oversaturated when I looked at the scopes. I threw impulz visionspace LUT at it and it brought the superwhites and deep blacks into a usable range revealing that this camera has a lot of hidden data in both extremes of the histogram. Agreed though...I am living by these vintage lenses...I don't even use diffusion filtration anymore to control my contrast with the nx1

I think that cinema5d test was flawed as fuck to be honest. They went with -10 contrast (big no no) AND included the smart dr thingie in the test. Dude every filmmaker knows to stay away from those in camera settings that promise extra DR. I haven't done cinematic tests but I think my DR in gamma DR mode at default settings is giving me something equal to sony a7s cine2 & 4 profiles. The standard picture profiles are equal (to my eye) to the a7s autumn picture style that people are using now. Only so much you can do with 8 bit's anyway. Again that cinema5d test is flawed

jeeeesus Christ it sure was ! Now I just put the overexposure blinkie thingie on and expose just riiight before it starts blinking and I get a good dynamic range in gamma dr mode.

Sidenote I think I can get a better quality file using the default picture styles. I figure if h.264 and h.265 codecs have troubles with low contrast why not make the image contrasty ? as you see here the nx cameras can recover the shadows and highs pretty well :-D

​Hi Andrew, thank you for this interesting review, you are doing a very good job with your review. I love this blog. Are u planning on doing some review for the NX1 with Shogun?

Do you know if the NX1 output its 10 or 8 bits? Thank you very much.