So I've been looking for a new camera recently and I stumbled across the Samsung NX Mini which looked quite sleek, good for selfies and has a detachable lens. I was looking for something that's a cross between a DSLR and a compact camera - high quality shots and videos but not super heavy and burdensome to lug around. This little camera caught my eye because well, it's Samsung and having a Samsung phone too must mean connectivity could be nice and easy, the 20.5mp as my last camera was only 16.1mp and I thought that was already really good and of course, the fact that it comes in white. I know I'm being a bit of a diva here but I really wanted something in white.
I did some extensive research before buying it off Amazon, such as reading up some very technical reviews of it, some less technical ones for the casual photographer and also taking on board some people's negative reviews of it. Overall, people said it's a cheap camera, good money for value, takes some good shots, good connectivity with the camera having it's own Wi-Fi and NFC support, the only downside some people mentioned is that with the standard pancake lens you can't zoom at all unless you go and buy the 9-27mm lens. I decided to go ahead and buy it for £239.99 off Amazon, the kit I bought was the camera + a 9mm pancake lens - the other lens you can get for this camera is a 9-27mm lens which lets you zoom but that's additional and not included in the standard kit.
The camera arrived pretty quickly, it came with:
- Camera body
- 9mm lens
- Charger
- Wrist strap
- Battery
- User manuals and 2 CDs, one for Adobe Lightroom and one for the camera software
First impressions was that it was small, sleek, nice aluminium finish on the top and bottom of the camera, lens clipped on nicely, the flip up screen was good - I liked how it turns on automatically when you flip the screen up to take selfies. The only downside was that the plastic "leather-like" main body felt really tacky and cheap. It was comfortable to hold and I didn't really experience any difficulty holding the camera and taking pictures that some people online have mentioned - maybe it's just because I have relatively small hands.
Unfortunately, I was quite disappointed with the performance of the camera, it wasn't as high quality as I expected and the video quality was average. One of the things that bugged me the most was that the focusing of the camera was terrible, of course with all cameras, when you hold down the camera button halfway it picks up focus before you take the picture - the camera had this but even before that, when you move the camera around it tends to blur a lot and then focus, blur and then focus again when you move some more. This was also apparent when you tried to take videos, even when the camera was still, it would blur and then focus, blur and then focus - as you can imagine this would be really annoying for vloggers. The settings for auto focusing were also very limited, it was literally off or on and although you can tap the screen to focus onto you, it tends to lose focus very quickly again.
Positives that I did like about this camera was that you don't need to take the battery out and attach it to some external charger to charge the camera which I quite liked. I could also use my Samsung phone charger to charge the camera which was pretty cool. I also liked that the camera uses Micro SD cards rather than the larger SD cards, I had a spare 64gb Micro SD from my Samsung S4 which came to be really useful. The mechanics of the flip up screen was also nice, it locks into place when you flip it up and back down so in no way at all was it cheap and flimsy. You can also use the touch screen to navigate settings or you can use the buttons so there were 2 ways of scrolling through settings / viewing images and videos. The touch screen is also handy for when you want to change settings whilst you're taking selfies, I can imagine without it, taking selfies would be a lot more annoying.
Verdict: Although the camera looks nice down on paper, I would highly recommend you go and test this camera out at a store rather than buy it based on what is said online, for a camera with such good specs I was quite disappointed with the performance of it. My Samsung S6 takes better pictures and videos with less MP and no major auto focusing issues like this camera has.
Basically, I ended up returning this camera due to disappointment.
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