Samsung NX20 review

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The NX20's body immediately makes you think it's a mid-range camera. The hard, textured materials are solid and sturdy, but they don't exude class or luxury by any means. At 4.8 inches wide and 3.5 inches tall, it's considerably larger than the Sony NEX-F3 — this is definitely not a small camera, and at 1.3 pounds it's not especially light either. Still, compared to a DSLR like the Nikon D7000 sitting next to it on my desk, it's positively svelte. There's a decent-size grip designed to help make the camera even easier to hold, but I didn't find it very comfortable: the grip is more angled than rounded, and my much-heavier D7000 is definitely easier to hold in one hand.

General feel aside, it's very clear that Samsung had a DSLR in mind when it was designing the NX20, because the camera is littered with buttons, controls, dials, ports, and flaps. It has a mode dial on top (take that, NEX-F3 and its awkward menu systems), along with a scroll wheel, metering control, video record button, function button, shutter release, and on-off switch. The on-off switch, by the way, is ludicrously difficult to move — you certainly won't turn the NX20 off by accident, but you might not turn it on when you want to, either. Next to the controls are the pop-up flash, a hump for the viewfinder, and a hotshoe for adding an external flash, mic, or accessory. The hump is flanked by stereo mics, and there's a speaker on the right side. A single door covering the card and battery slots is on the bottom, a spot I increasingly dislike; having to take your camera off a tripod to swap batteries or cards is a pain. There are Micro HDMI and Micro USB underneath another door, on the left side.

Around back there are more buttons and dials, from the standard five-way directional pad and playback buttons to a couple of DSLR-like buttons like Auto Exposure Lock. Generally, I love the layout — nearly everything is accessible to your right thumb, and I quickly got to the point where I could find the button I was looking for without needing to look away from the viewfinder or LCD.

The most noticeable thing the NX20 has that most of its mirrorless competition lacks is a viewfinder. It's an electronic viewfinder, an 800 x 600 display that offers 100 percent coverage, meaning you can see the whole frame. This is a particularly good model, but many of the same advantages apply to all EVFs: you can see a lot of information on the display, and even review your photos without taking your eye away from the viewfinder. For me personally, that doesn't outweigh the simple fact that with the NX20 (and really any EVF), you just don't get an accurate representation of your photo through the viewfinder. The color profile is particularly off in this case, displaying photos with white balance problems they don't necessarily have. I'm always partial to optical viewfinders, because even if they don't show all the helpful information, they offer a far more accurate portrayal of the photo you'll capture.

If you're not a fan either, it's easy to avoid ever using the NX20's viewfinder because its display is so good. Samsung boasts often about how it's the most vertically integrated camera manufacturer on the planet — it makes virtually every part of a camera, for its own products and its customers' — and the 3-inch AMOLED panel on the back of the NX20 indicates the benefit of that arrangement. It's filled with 614,000 dots, which isn't as sharp as the 921,000-dot displays on some other cameras, but it's still a very good display, with great contrast and color reproduction. It also articulates, rotating out to the right side of the camera and then spinning 270 degrees so you can hold the camera at virtually any angle and still see the screen. As someone who constantly stands in the middle of crowds trying to shoot stages at concerts, or gadgets down in the middle of a crowd, it's a crucial feature.

Samsung doesn't quite go full-DSLR with the button and dial selection for the NX20, but it supplements the one-touch controls with a ton of two-touch settings. My favorite is the iFunction system, which takes place mostly on the lens. You press the iFn button on the lens itself, and then use the focusing ring to control one of a couple of important settings for whatever mode you're in. In aperture priority, for instance, you can change aperture or exposure without ever moving your hand off the lens or taking your eyes off the screen.

There's also a quick-access settings menu available in most modes, too. Pressing the Fn button on the back of the camera brings up a handful of important settings and functions like image size, exposure, and drive mode, and you scroll through the settings with the rear dial and change them with the top wheel. Between this setting and the iFunction tool, Samsung does a really nice job of managing the menu system — not everything is one button-click away, but very few things are more than two. There's a bit of a learning curve while you figure out what's where, but it's a really good system once you're used to it.

If you do have to dig into the menu, you'll find a much more standard interface. It's all text-based menus, a combination of gray and white text, and blue highlights. It's simple to navigate, but gets a little cluttered until you turn off Samsung's too-helpful overlay menus that try and explain everything. They're Samsung's way of trying to teach you how to use the NX20 (and any camera, really), but it's mostly just clutter.