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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.