Petition for Samsung NX1 hack

[vaga]

Looks like many of the Samsung lenses are on sale right now (including $300 off each of the S Lenses) at B&H.

Unfortunately, the NX1 camera body seems to be discontinued everywhere. (Sad news for people like me that don't want to buy used camera bodies).

[sandro]

1 hour ago, Pavel Mašek said:

It seems that you have to have NX500 with 2.5K (+bitrate) hack :-) .

I hope that it will lead to 4K/1080p without NR for all modes in NX1 (NX500)

I meant from the samples you linked?

[Pavel Mašek]

On 16. 3. 2016 at 10:47 PM, Geoff CB said:

"Duration: 00:00:35.96, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 75059 kb/s
Stream #0:0(eng): Video: hevc (Main) (hvc1 / 0x31637668), yuvj420p(pc, bt709), 2560x1440, 74864 kb/s, 25 fps, 25 tbr, 120k tbn, 120k tbc (default)"

 

 

Well, there are no samples yet - guys there just test it and they have not yet uploaded any screen grab from the video to proof there us is no NR

BTW - I saw noise grain in very early stages of 2.5K video so I believe it is possible (see above)

[vasile]

39 minutes ago, vaga said:

Looks like many of the Samsung lenses are on sale right now (including $300 off each of the S Lenses) at B&H.

Unfortunately, the NX1 camera body seems to be discontinued everywhere. (Sad news for people like me that don't want to buy used camera bodies).

http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-Wireless-Smart-Camera-16-50mm/dp/B00V5UDU60/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1461082163&sr=8-2&keywords=nx1

But please do not buy it in the hope that more capabilities would be unlocked by anyone. Nothing is guaranteed. See here why: http://***URL removed***/forums/post/57624059.

[vaga]

^$1700 is more than I'm willing to pay for this camera, unfortunately. Also, I don't want the regular 16-50 lens.

When they were available, the $1049 body only or kit deals with the mic (like B&H) were attractive.

[vaga]

Is it possible to record video on the NX1 targeting the AdobeRGB color space? I know you can take AdobeRGB pictures.

[vasile]

43 minutes ago, vaga said:

^$1700 is more than I'm willing to pay for this camera, unfortunately. Also, I don't want the regular 16-50 lens.

When they were available, the $1049 body only or kit deals with the mic (like B&H) were attractive.

I am fairly sure they will bring more in, but in an irregular fashion. All elements seem to point to Samsung not officially discontinuing the system and only running short-ish batches of items, depending on received orders. At some point B&H had them as "discontinued" then they got new ones, now they are again out of stock (ok discontinued, although at this stage I won't believe it yet, since they were suddenly "undiscontinued" just a week ago I think).

[SMGJohn]

2 hours ago, Pavel Mašek said:

Well, there are no samples yet - guys there just test it and they have not yet uploaded any screen grab from the video to proof there us is no NR

BTW - I saw noise grain in very early stages of 2.5K video so I believe it is possible (see above)

Sometimes one just have to question what insanity Samsung went through to make it so damn hard to just disable that NR, even if HEVC is a lets just say not the best codec out there for a camera but even with NR off the differences are night and day imao, it still wont be glorious but Samsung should have stopped being so childish and just given us the option to turn this off I remember quite early a lot of NX users asked for this, we been ignored ever since about it. 

Despite them pushing out the updates they never included an option for disabling NR in video mode.

 

[vaga]

Yea, I agree with you. Hopefully, they keep the lenses discounted when the camera comes back in. Anyone know what B&H's return policy is?

[sandro]

It is a shame to have a camera in 2015 with usable ISO at only 1600.

[MountneerMan]

11 minutes ago, vasile said:

I am fairly sure they will bring more in, but in an irregular fashion. All elements seem to point to Samsung not officially discontinuing the system and only running short-ish batches of items, depending on received orders. At some point B&H had them as "discontinued" then they got new ones, now they are again out of stock (ok discontinued, although at this stage I won't believe it yet, since they were suddenly "undiscontinued" just a week ago I think).

I am kind of thinking that samsung is just moving existing stock around from retailers that have stock but are not selling it to retailers who don't have stock but could possibly sell it.

[vaga]

I suppose that is a possibility

[tugela]

If people are still buying them it is weird that they would not continue making them.

Especially since it looks like they could have kept the camera relevant with firmware updates, which you would think would be a relatively small investment for them.

[chauncy]

1 hour ago, vaga said:

^$1700 is more than I'm willing to pay for this camera, unfortunately. Also, I don't want the regular 16-50 lens.

When they were available, the $1049 body only or kit deals with the mic (like B&H) were attractive.

that is an absurd price, even if it had the s lens.

[MountneerMan]

13 minutes ago, tugela said:

If people are still buying them it is weird that they would not continue making them.

Especially since it looks like they could have kept the camera relevant with firmware updates, which you would think would be a relatively small investment for them.

The cost of production > the revenue in sales(people will only buy them at a discount now) ...  Simply put it does not make sense for them to make any more lenes

[vasile]

3 minutes ago, MountneerMan said:

The cost of production > the revenue in sales(people will only buy them at a discount now) ...  Simply put it does not make sense for them to make any more lenes

I doubt the BOM is over 200$ for the body, let us say 300 with manufacturing. The rest is retailer markup and getting a return on the investment in IP.

IP investment can be considered sunk cost at this stage. I guess what I am trying to say is incremental cost/camera for Samsung is very very low, once they have written off development costs - which they seem to have done after the restructuring of their imaging division.

So there's nothing to prevent them to continue to make just enough of them so they can still claim it is not discontinued, and keep their options open in case the market recovers.

[MountneerMan]

41 minutes ago, vasile said:

I doubt the BOM is over 200$ for the body, let us say 300 with manufacturing. The rest is retailer markup and getting a return on the investment in IP.

IP investment can be considered sunk cost at this stage. I guess what I am trying to say is incremental cost/camera for Samsung is very very low, once they have written off development costs - which they seem to have done after the restructuring of their imaging division.

So there's nothing to prevent them to continue to make just enough of them so they can still claim it is not discontinued, and keep their options open in case the market recovers.

Agreed... I guess my point is that samsung is a large company and they are looking at the actual sales figures and production cost and are doing what they think makes the most business sense.

Its really just too bad they wont fucking tell us all what that actually is?

[Pavel Mašek]

Kino Seed just posted video of 2.5K video without noise reduction - http://***URL removed***/forums/thread/3990893?page=2#forum-post-57632926

Noise grain is very visible here, but we should realize that it is quite high ISO (6400). I think it would be more usable and subtle in 4K.

It is proof that noise reduction is not built-in the codec - really great news I think.

Vasile/Otto - is there any chance if 4K could be inserted into slot for VGA? Maybe then 4K would be without NR.

I am wondering how it would affect 1080p modes which suffer with high NR above low ISO.

[vasile]

13 minutes ago, Pavel Mašek said:

Kino Seed just posted video of 2.5K video without noise reduction - http://***URL removed***/forums/thread/3990893?page=2#forum-post-57632926

Noise grain is very visible here, but we should realize that it is quite high ISO (6400). I think it would be more usable and subtle in 4K.

It is proof that noise reduction is not built-in the codec - really great news I think.

Vasile/Otto - is there any chance if 4K could be inserted into slot for VGA? Maybe then 4K would be without NR.

I am wondering how it would affect 1080p modes which suffer with high NR above low ISO.

Not sure (read: I have no clue) what is going on in there. It is definitely not any parameter that I could see that is any different between the VGA slot settings and the 1080p settings except the resolution which I replaced in the VGA slot.

Having said that, there are many many parameters set and reset in that general code area and I did not examine them in detail as this would be a very time consuming drudge work.

I would have to step through the entire code between button push and release of controi to RTOS, manually record all parameter values that are sent out to the RTOS, and do it twice: for 1080p and then again for the VGA slot. I do not really want to do it :-(, especially since nothing is guaranteed: it might also turn out to be a matter of codec internal settings - i.e. if input matches preset => apply built-in preset [which might have NR=on] and for everything else, apply generic settings that might have NR=off.

I don't know.

Also, when I was working on the initial bit rate hack, I manually inserted 4k resolution (directly in the CPU registers) at the point where this is passed on to the RTOS, whilst set on 1080p, because I was curious if it would then uncrop it - bad news there, crop stays - but I did not look at all into noise levels.

[vasile]

3 hours ago, chauncy said:

that is an absurd price, even if it had the s lens.

I know for sure Amazon charge what the market will bear :-) - which is remarkable for a camera more than 18 months old. I will keep an eye on it to see if they do sell it.

As an interesting tidbit: they (amazon.fr) kept the price of the 30mm, for a long time, at 205 EUR, which was, incidentally, precisely what a French brick and mortar chain advertised it for (I think it was one of their last ones). A day after the non-amazon price disappeared, Amazon price suddenly went up to >300 EUR. I wonder why :-)