Scaring small children with stern selfies.
At any rate I ambled over to the door and accepted the insanely distorted Fedex box and wished the driver a good day. Studio Dog and I sniffed the box and discerned that it came from Samsung's P.R. agency in NYC. I thought it might be a t-shirt. But it was a bit heavy and angular for a t-shirt. I grabbed a vicious, cold steel stiletto and sliced the box open with the barest flick of my wrist. The contents were padded with some sort of color newspaper pages. When I pulled the box out of the box it turned out to be the container for a camera called a Samsung NX Mini.
And mine is, indeed, white. Right down to its wrist strap.
So what is this all about? Well, it's a tiny, thin, interchangeable lens, mirror-free camera that uses the Samsung version of a one inch sensor. The lens on the front of mine is a 9mm, f3.5 which corresponds (in full frame speak) to a 24mm lens. They also currently make a zoom that goes from 9mm to 27mm, which is about a 75mm big camera equivalent.
I assembled the camera and lens, put in the big battery and tossed in a micro-SD card. The camera spent a little time on a turbo-charged USB-4 terminal, sucked up enough juice to turn the battery light green and then we were off to the races. Scaring small children and mindlessly riding on escalators.
The camera is quick and agile but made with enough metal to give it a bit of gravitas. It has all the stuff I don't really care about, like NFC and wi-fi, and a few things I do care about like raw files and manual settings. And a battery that's rated for over 600 shots per charge.
The big draw of the camera is its selfie enabling design. The rear screen swivels up and around so you can see yourself over the top of the camera. You can click the shutter in the old school method or you can set the camera to trigger upon a gracious smile or a wink. I used the face detection Af and, since I rarely smile, I engaged the shutter with my index finger. We would have waited a long time for smile detection but, given enough time we might have pulled off a wink shutter by dint of some facial tick or another....
If you wear a suit and tie, or it is perennially winter in your locale, the camera is quite pocketable. If you wear a pair of jeans and a t-shirt as you everyday wear it is only pocketable if you like to present with a rectangular bulge in your pocket.
The camera is actually a very good performer. The exposures I took on a dark and overcast day were all very much on target and the AF only failed me when I didn't pay attention to what I should be aiming at. It has all the basic controls and setting parameters of its bigger brothers in the Samsung line up. And the menu beats the pants of just about any Nex I've had the pleasure to own.
It's actually a fun, quick camera to have around. The 20 megapixel sensor seems pretty darn good, the wide angle lens is nice and sharp, wide open and the rear screen is good for most work. If I were shooting seriously I'd have to put a Zacuto or Hoodman finder on the back of it to make it professional but that would almost triple the size of the package and would look pretty stupid.
This is pretty much the perfect camera for a compulsive perfectionist who loves to do selfies for social media but who wants something that generates higher quality files than all the cellphones on the market. It's also good for gruff, old cusses who just want a camera they can keep on the dashboard of the pick-up truck for quick snaps of stuff they come across on a day to day basis; like Sasquatch and Oil Derrick fires, and beautiful landscapes preening under the majestic setting sun of Texas.
A note to the marketing people: White? Really? White? Really? Not that there's anything wrong with white but was black or brown even an option? Really? White?
Ben was intrigued but I decided I'd keep this one around for my incredible number of selfies I expect to take on a day to day basis. Hmmmm. Ready? Crowd in close and we'll get a selfie of us in front of something very Austin-y. Like traffic. Or a music festival.
Added later: Target market???? See below:
