SMGJohn

For NX500 get the pancake lenses like the 20mm f2 and the zoom 16-50mm f3.5-5.6

I used the 20mm f2 from a friend and its amazing. 
But if you do not mind, the S lens is of course the greatest thing that was ever invented except for its heavy weight, I prefer if it was more in the region of the Sony F2.8 lenses but then again you do get another stop of light with the S lens.

4 hours ago, Matthew Hartman said:

I was in the same camp but I recently saw someone here post a link to an official statement announcing they are closing their entire digital camera division. It was a S.Korean publication. That being said, Samsung has a tendency to word things vaguely, and sometimes open-ended. This could be a factor of poor translation but as an American I have a hard time putting their statements into proper perspective.

The way the article was worded seemed like Samsung felt that they could no longer compete in this space because in their view, consumers were dropping DSLR, mirrorless, and point-and-shoot cameras in favor of smartphone camera technology. They even sighted Canon losing business in this metric too. While I agree these findings could be very possible among your average consumer, it sure leaves hobbyists and professionals out of the equation, and I feel that's very, very unfortunate, and way too reactive to the natural peaks and valleys of supply and demand.

The above being said, I personally suspect that if the market shifted Samsung will shift with it. I've seen this happen time and time again with most of their product offerings. Right now, they are hyper focused on their smartphone, VR, smart home and smart appliance technology. But there's nothing to say that this will always be the case in the foreseeable future. Look at Olympus and Fuji. Almost went into damn near obscurity and then low and behold we now have new offerings from them in the pro space.

What I find interesting is that Samsung still officially advertises their NX products AND continues to update their Camera Manager app. However camera and lens firmware updates have frozen for over a year now. I suppose these are low level efforts on Samsung's part. But is it a strategy to keep the door open with consumers should they decide to re enter the market?

This is why I put together the Keep Samsung NX Alive petition. It was in effort to demonstrate to Samsung that there IS still a demand for their NX cameras. Is 1,500 signatures in a span of almost 2 years enough of a demand for Samsung? I don't know. What I do know is that I tried like hell to reach the proper people in charge of that division and have not received and ounce of correspondence back. This could mean so many things, and with all the legal controversy at Samsung headquarters in recent years, it's very hard to read into it. I also know that if you read the almost 800 comments attached to the petition you quickly see a central theme. People love the shat out of the NX1/500 and Samsung's glass.

As Enna Park, a huge Samsung NX1 pro and all around great guy from South Korea once told me, "Samsung boss is a chicken heart".

Yes, its hard to predict the matter whether Samsung may reenter, but its a possibility and as I personally have seen, I have to disagree with people relaying on their smartphones, its become a new "trend" if you want to buy fancy big spec cameras it seems. 

And the Samsung NX Mini is a genius camera, I still see those around being used from time to time, frankly not everyone have the money to fork out for a top of the line smartphone just for the camera.
While Canon and Sony sales may be dwindling, compact small form factor cameras seem to be a hot selling and even the camera store in this tiny town of 20k people is selling them a lot, how much it is going in the bigger world I do not know but Samsung was LEADING the race with the best small form factor cameras from the NX1000 to the NX300.

Someone even hacked the NX3000 I think to shoot 1440p video, pretty amazing back then when only GH4 was the big 4k player in town. 

14 hours ago, Matthew Hartman said:

Without companies like Samsung who have extensive research and development labs and endless funds to experiment, don't expect huge technological leaps in the product cycles of current top manufactures. In my opinion, Samsung not only did themselves a disservice by "closing" their digital camera business, they did a disservice to their existing and potential customers and the entire industry as a whole. Look how much Samsung has influenced Apple over recent years?

Samsung also gave rise to a fanbase for their cameras that so many other manufacturers struggles to do, we even had people hacking the damn thing making it even better, do you see people hacking Nikons to get better video? Nope. 
Do you see people hacking Fuji? Or Olympus? Barely anyone worth mentioning. 

I only know of Canon and Panasonic who had a userbase with such dedicated fans they hacked the cameras to make them better.

However, I cannot find an official statement by Samsung that they closed their camera division. No one from Samsung ever came out and told they were officially abandoning cameras, I do not get why people keep saying this, its only tabloid news sites whom keeps spreading the same old over and over again, I keep seeing stupid rumours from newspages even today saying Samsung may be closing the camera division for good. 

They certainly did not loose profits, I see people with Samsung cameras all the time here, and I live in Norway. I see people with NX1000's, NX300's. There lots of them on sale all the time in the used market. Clearly they did well in Europe, even on vacation I spotted a few with Samsung cameras, why is this? Because Samsung is a brand, you see Samsung you think of quality, even the exploding Note blunder is largely forgotten these days by consumers. 

On 18.7.2017 at 11:26 AM, Matthew Hartman said:

I don't know what you guys are talking about when you say you can find cheap deals on Samsung NX1 products. The prices I see online are almost doubled what they were when the camera was first released. I saw an S lens for roughly $3,000 USD on Amazon tonight. That certainly wasn't the retail price 3 years ago, it was much less if memory serves me right.

This is a recent article on the front page of this site: "Nikon struggling to match Samsung NX500 stills quality with 2 year head start".

For a reminder, this petition is still receiving signatures to this day, almost 2 years later:
https://www.ipetitions.com/petition/samsung-keep-nx-alive

You just need to look in the right places, eBay, AliExpress smaller local sites, camera stores still stocking up lenses etc. 
I actually just recently found Ex-Pro batteries which are made in UK and not in China, these have quality and sometimes offer BETTER capacity than original batteries, I bought 3 of them with 2660mAh for the same price I paid for my spare one after it was lost/stolen. 

The 12-24mm lens I paid 400 dollars for brand new straight from Korea, now keep it mind it was almost 700 dollars in Europe at the time NX1 was new. Nikon and Canon lenses are not far from that original price tag either with their equivalents, a real shame if you ask me. 

And there is sold Samsung NX cameras even NX1 and NX500 and lenses here in the local used market all the time for silly prices, I saw the NX1 including both the S lenses the 16-50mm and the 50-200mm for roughly 1860 dollars, that is pretty much a steal specially in the way it looked, almost no sign of abuse etc.

So again, look in the right places and you will find what you are looking for used or new, frankly I rarely buy new lenses because I am not made of gold coins. 

According to DXO Mark the Sony A9 has almost a stop worse dynamic range than the NX500, LOL.

It seems to me most people seem more interested in just eyeballing one side of the statistic, while NX500 may have better dynamic range at lower ISO, it has worse ISO performance compared to Nikon. 
If you take into consideration all 3 of the stats then yes, and funny enough sensor technology has not really improved much lately as it had for example 5 years ago. 
If you look at all the recent cameras, none of them really stand out much, I mean the statistically the Sony A7R II is much better camera than the A9, its got twice the pixels, yet rate similar to the A9 in low light ISO performance, has superior dynamic range, has amazing colour rating as you would expect of a high megapixel camera. 

I think Andrews underlying core issue with Nikon and probably all other Japanese camera manufacturer, no innovation lately, none at all. 
Its come to a point were milking their own customers is far more important than making something new and brilliant. 
Samsung made a bold move, they may not have sold lots of cameras as they had hoped for, but they sure went down in the history books and will be remembered as that one anomaly super camera that did it all, the perfect mirrorless that did great photos and great videos. 
Maybe it did not do amazing photos or amazing videos, but you just cannot have it all after all it was only 1300 dollars, and Sony asks 3200 dollars for a camera that has questionable design elements to it.

29 minutes ago, lucabutera said:

I think it is a processor data processing problem.
It's a pity not to have a working team like magic lantern on Samsung NX! ...

I been humouring the idea whether we should start a fundraiser/kickstarter to get enough money to hire really good developers who could develop a new firmware for this camera. 

On 6.7.2017 at 0:49 AM, lucabutera said:

These days I wanted to test the maximum bitrates with hack NX/KS.
I've found that to get the maximum bitrates you need to turn off all the functions that require memory and cpu:
So if I turn off bluetooth, all the automatic functions, and close the display by going on EVF can go up to 220Mbit/s without interruption and up to 240Mbit/s for about a minute.
The benefit that is obtained is that the macroblochin is reduced in size, transforming itself from small squares into a noise-like grain.
What I think is that if the hack could turn off the display and the EVF being recorded, the NX1 could go over 250Mbit/s without any recording time limit.

Yes but having autofocus and stabilisation off is a big bummer when you use the camera for its mobility like me and do not have huge rails and tripods to work with. 
At best it will do 160mbps but its unstable, it could just be my card is too slow even though its a 2000x Lexar from 2016 300MB/s. 

It would be interesting if anyone could test an even faster card to see whether it is the ARM CPU being limited in its processing capability or if its truly the SD card being too slow to write the data to.

On 13.7.2017 at 6:41 PM, bdiamond said:

I did the same thing, over the course of about 13 months sold my set up and went to an A6300, then to the A6500 for IBIS and no over heating, then went to the A7Sii but couldn't deal with the awful AF so went back to A6500, just to end up going back to the NX1. 

Sometimes you just do not know how good hardware you have until you gotten rid of it. 
I have yet to see any camera with the same price tag of the NX1 that has hardware to match, none. Sony A7sII and the A7rII are twice the price tag the NX1 was, these cameras still lack in consistency whereas the NX1 got it right and even Samsung willing to update the camera. There still third party manufacturers out there still making batteries, adapters and whatnot. Amazing really, you can still find brand new lenses for half the price on the internet, I just bought the 12-24mm, its brilliant! Sure its not F2.8 but it gets the job done and quality is there, I have a hard time finding Nikkor or Cannon glass equally good for the same price.

I would just like to add an update to people still looking for batteries for the NX1 and NX500 or the BP1130 and the BP1900 batteries respectively.

The best third party ones that are still being made to these days and are in big quantity is the Ex-Pro brand. Genuine BP1130 batteries can still be sourced from eBay for a reasonable price but the NX1 you have Ex-Pro I highly recommend this brand as its even better than the original Samsung ones and higher capacity from 1900mAh vs 2660mAh Ex-Pro Elite

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ex-Pro-Samsung-BP1900-2260mAh-Li-x/dp/B00YEZ2XLG/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&qid=1500080577&sr=8-8&keywords=BP1900&th=1

http://www.ebay.com/itm/New-Genuine-Original-Samsung-BP1130-Battery-For-NX200-NX210-NX2000-NX300-NX300M-/331534428837?hash=item4d30fdeaa5:g:PIYAAOSwEgVWTCr2

On Android its still on version 1.6.07.160510

I think Samsung is just updating the application for iOS and perhaps at later date for Android 7.0 since a lot of people are complaining it stopped working. 

I remember that someone posted a post here showing the effects high bitrate had on macro blocking, personally I never experienced macro blocking anymore with 140mbps bitrate as its the most stable one with autofocus and everything on, if you turn off autofocus and sound you can push it to stupid levels like 220mbps is the highest I ever got before it gets unstable.

It speaks for itself, you probably remember the macro blocking issue before Samsung increased the bitrate through firmware update, I still got old footage with horrendous macro blocking before the first firmware rolled out. 

I shot a lot of 140mbps bitrate video on Crete when I was there last year, did not notice any macroblocking that would cause issues for me and this is with in-camera picture profiles, the last one I pushed saturation to 10 just to see how much the codec could handle, seem to have handled the colours just fine, skin colour is a disaster though when you start experimenting with the picture profiles.

NX1 & NX500 Calm – Type 801 - R1.00 G0.95 B1.00 | 3 Sat | -10 Sharp | -1 Contr | -6 Hue | 16-255

NX1 & NX500 Standard – Type 006 - R1.00 G0.95 B1.00 | 3 Sat | -10 Sharp | -1 Contr | 6 Hue | 0-255

NX1 & NX500 Standard – Type 005 - R1.00 G0.95 B1.00 | 10 Sat | -10 Sharp | 8 Contr | -3 Hue | 0-255

Andrew gets it, its never about the equipment and all about the way its used. 

What about Soviet cinema? Their cameras are never as great as their western counterparts, the Soviet 70mm beasts bleed a lot in corners even with great lenses, the SovColor film also produce a monstrous amount of noise even at low ISO format. Yet they shaped the modern cinema to what its today or at least majority of the techniques anyway.

They also did not have stupid amount of equipment on cameras, I mean just look a this crew, now compare that picture to what we got today, and they shot one of the
greatest science fiction flick on that. The west too, we just used to have simple camera setup, how backwards we gone today, we need all sorts of tools just to assist us
like histograms and 50 extra monitors just to see anything, its gone to the point of insanity, picture quality does not make a movie, in fact audio does and good
story telling.

You can always try to double click Fn key to see if a secondary menu pops up, then its either Kino seed or NX-KS albeit the latter would physically display information that its installed.

It seems using Adobe DNG Editor is a waste of time matching the colours by hand, the results are close but not 100% or even 90% particular the reds are the hardest to obtain.

Left original RAW - Middle Retro JPEG - Right Adobe DNG Editor Retro mimic

I been wondering on how you can get the Samsung picture profiles in the camera for JPEG's and Video to work for Camera raw.

Some places suggested just snap a picture of a colour table and then adjust the colours as close as possible to the RAW image and export it as a LUT.

However does anyone know of any better methods than this? I am not sure if it would work very well for all situations.

Its silly how expensive cameras have gotten and not much better than the NX1 have they gotten either, sad.

On 8.6.2017 at 8:42 PM, sandro said:

I forgot, if the NX500 doesn't have the same NR on video above 1600 is it then better in low light?

Grain is super fine on the NX500 on higher than 1600 ISO specially in 4k and 1440p.

But above 3200 ISO there so much grain noise that its unusable image specially because the grain is white so its impossible to remove with noise reduction tools.

Antivirus hack? Please explain

On 5.6.2017 at 8:49 PM, Kisaha said:

what is the point of having negative black?

Master black levels are only useful if you want good straight out the camera images, its pointless to use this with GammaDR as it wont provide any dynamic range improvements.

Crushing blacks might be good for aesthetics reasons, these systems shoot superb colours out the box and the fact you can tweak them to your liking is a really good thing and I think Samsung did a really well job with this I still want LOG though but yeah avoid if you just shoot flat as its mostly for aesthetics reasons. 

Check here for some epic results:

I been experimenting a lot with the colour profiles in the NX1 and NX500 but I been too lazy to edit the videos together and published them on YouTube.
I got a really good footage of a terrible housefire this winter using in-camera colours.

Check here:

The master black levels just make the black levels more black or more grey, at 0 it should be 0-255 and at +15 it should be 15-255 and -15-255 etc.

Crushing your blacks make no sense though unless you want a specific look. 

6 hours ago, Parker said:

This is exactly how I use my NX500, the small, compact size and silent shutter make it an awesome stills camera, very easy to put on a small travel tripod and just shoot away on location. It is also my main vacation/walkaround stills camera for the same reason. The dynamic range of this camera is truly awesome; as long as you can protect the highlights, at low ISO's, the shadows can be raised 100% in Lightroom with no visible noise of any kind. 

In this video here, one of my NX500 timelapses starts at 3:52, and there are two more starting at 5:08.

 

Nice video Parker, did you grade or use in-camera colour profiles? I got to ask cause I seen some insane results from those colour profiles from my own use and other peoples results. 

Never shoot above 1600 ISO unless you must, avoid anything above 3200 at all cost you will destroy your image. 

Change all settings in colours to R1.00 G0.95 B1.00 these are the colour settings because the cameras have green bias you will loose a lot of vibrant green colours. You can also do 0.90 with green works just fine too depends on what you prefer. 

Also get the hack either Kinoseed which is easiest to install but slowest to initiate at startup or Vasile's hack which is ultra fast but does not have as many features for picture mode. It sort of help with the loss of information duo to high ISO use, but most importantly it reduces compression artefacts in footage greatly.

Yeah that is true, you can just buy a really big powerbank and stuff it in your pocket and have a long USB 3.0 cable from it to the camera, it will charge all the time that is why I love NX1 and NX500 the fact that they can charge through the USB port is genius. 

It might make you look like a digital photographer from the 90s but I use this method during the winters to keep the charge, I also used this method at a concert were I had to record continuously for almost 2 hours.

On 29.4.2017 at 11:59 PM, jcs said:

Historically, CUDA drivers with PP CC have been more stable than OpenCL on OSX. When the CUDA drivers go bad, worst case is black video, garbage, flipped images, etc. When OpenCL goes bad, can cause a kernel panic and instant reboot (lost work if last edit wasn't saved for any open apps). Sounds like you are on Windows running an AMD GPU, no CUDA option? If so, suggest getting a recent Nvidia GPU (GTX 1080 if possible, some of the much less expensive versions run just about as fast (within seconds for most tasks: see the GTX 1070 vs top-of-the-line GPUs here: https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Premiere-Pro-CC-2017-GeForce-GTX-1080-Ti-11GB-Performance-912/)).

Some 2015.x releases were practically unusable due to bugs and crashes: lots of wasted time working around bugs, including switching between OSX and Windows for whichever version was less buggy, and refactoring edits just to make progress and finish projects.

Win10Pro, 6950X, GTX 1080 and OSX Sierra, 12 Core MacPro GTX 980ti have been reasonably stable so far with CUDA and even OpenCL on OSX* (haven't cut anything major on the Win10Pro box since the latest release came out, just tests).

* In one simple render benchmark, CUDA was a few seconds faster.

What would you recommend? I am afraid of using the CC 2017 as my experience is just getting worse with every new updates, CC 2014 worked relatively well for me I guess unless my memory is fooling me, but that means no H265 support. CC 2015 is mixture of luck and bad luck.

Stick to CS6 & CC 2014? Or would you recommend CC 2017?

I got Windows 8.1 Pro x64, i7-3940XM Quad Core, 32GB DDR3 1600Mhz and Radeon R9 M290X 4GB, I genuinely just want something that work because last time it kept screwing me over all the time on the render, and I wasted a week just rendering out JPEG's because it kept rendering faulty frames every 10 minute and because I already had done doing the project reverting to an older version was not an option, I believe that was CC 2015. 

After that I honestly just lost all the will to edit videos on Adobe, Photoshop works very well, InDesign works everything else however just screwing me over specially Adobe Muse lately.