In Berlin with Samsung, a handful of photgraphers and a brand new camera.

And so, I've made it to Berlin after a long, tiring and frustrating flight that should have taken about eleven hours but stretched into the better part of 20.  I was greeted at the airport in Berlin and whisked to what is now my all time favorite hotel, Motel One on Urania Strasse. The rooms are small, clean and functional but the public part is hip, modern, collegial and comfortable. Breakfast this morning felt like my times in big college dorms: cool young people intermixed with more experienced but equally cool people. The lobby bar is opened 24 hours and nothing feels pretentious or overpriced.

Today my sponsor for the trip, Samsung, arranged for about eight of us to take a tour through the historics parts of the city (more on that in my next post) and we were given ample time to cruise around on our own and snap away to our heart's desires.

ON TO THE CAMERA

If you are a frequent reader you probably know that Samsung sent me a copy of their newest, and ostensibly coolest,,camera: THE SAMSUNG GALAXY NX. I am writing this in the commodious lobby at 1am and my camera is upstairs in my room, on my pillow uploading 325 new files to Dropbox. You can set up the camera to auto share or automatically upload everything you shoot to Dropbox. The camera comes with a 50 gigabyte account on that sharing service free for a year.

How is the camera performing? it's a mixed bag to be honest. The sensor part and the imaging processing add up to beautiful images. Easily on par with images from any of the Sony, Canon or Olympus cameras I've owned or tested. I'm having a few teething problems that are slowing own my spontaneous street shooting. I hesitate to mention them as I am sure a round or two of firmware revs will fix them( and Samsung is hardly the first camera maker whose product had a glitch or two at launch) but I've always shot straight with my readers and you should know what I'm experiencing.

The camera is slow to start up as it's actually launching a software OS. My solution is to turn the power management down so the system is always live. Bring extra batteries. It's currently too slow when switching between rear screen to EVF. Also, there is no way to choose only to use the EVF so you'll have situations where you know you want to be in EVF mode but have to go through the process of bringing the camera up to you eye and then waiting for the view to switch.

All in all it's a beautiful file generator and the perfect kind of camera for people who work slowly, methodically and one frame at a time. In it's current iteration it's a great studio shooter's camera but I wouldn't want to shoot fast action with it. 

I do love that it's doing some drudgery for me and getting my images up into the cloud.

Don't take my comments on the operational aspects of the camera as a scathing critique or the last word. I've only had the camera in my"shooting Hans" for a few days and it generally takes me a lot of time to get up to speed with new gear.

I'll try to unlock more of the camera's secrets tomorrow but it's late and I'm tired...

One another note, Berlin is incredibly. I love this city!!!!  And Samsung is a great host. They seem to understand that photographers work best with a good supply of tasty food, excellent coffee and satisfying red wine. Yeah, I know there's good beer here I'm abstaining from that. You can have too many hobbies...