Good day,
Next on my collection of cameras, this is a used Samsung NX 3000.
As it turns out, Samsung before the 2020’s made cameras and had a whole lineup for them, which for someone who has exactly zero memories of anything pre 2020, is something I did not know.
These cameras are rare – most of the cameras that you could find tend to be from the bigger and still surviving players; Sony, Canon, Fujifilm, etc.
The NX 3000 was released in 2014, more details of which I’m not too familiar with. These have the option of interchanging lens (Which Samsung sold) and definitely come in different colors should you want some flair in yours.
As seen, the one I picked up is a brown leather finish.
The photo quality is nice albeit the photos are Super Fine, and I definitely did not get the right settings for night time photos as the shots are too dark, and the camera refuses to take a photo. Otherwise, I think its perfectly fine.
Photo quality is frankly not the best – it is not the best mirrorless camera out there. This particular one seems to have a problem with the rotating dials, meaning it is permanently stuck in shutter mode.
The shutter isn’t quick either, so burst-shots tend to have delay or impossible to use for such a practice.
The lens in question is a 16-50 OIS, and uses digital zoom. I would say that it completely falls apart if you want to take good photos from afar, but it handles itself nicely when without or with a little bit of zoom.
The lens in question is a 16-50 OIS, and uses digital zoom. Normally for smartphones, digital zoom is one way to zoom in to an increasingly blurry image – newer devices benefitting from AI assistance – but the zoom on the lens doesn’t completely kill the experience. Extreme use it will falter, but moderate use of the feature is completely fine.
The menu is less cluttered than the Sony a6400 I use, but it is to be said that Sony has a lot more configurable settings.
Some items that have somewhat big significance like timestamps are buried within the menu via language jargon and settings inside the settings, but most of the basic settings are clear to find.
The UX on the Samsung so far out of my experience with four cameras, has been the most satisfying. Genuinely speaking, the sound design is spot-on but outdated – using sounds that can be related to sounds made by phones of its era.
The physical buttons have some weight, but is well-judged to make the experience less of a simple point-and-shoot, and more of enjoying the process.
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| Photo examples of the NX 3000, using jpg, super fine |
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| This timestamp is not included in the original photo. The NX 3000 embedded somewhere in the menu has an option to add timestamps. |
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| (Note: RAW does not include the timestamp when exporting the images) |
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| Added 3/6/25 – Super fine, JPG, w/ timestamp |
Night photos are very unworkable but more due in part to the shutter mode being stuck and my lack of knowledge to prepare for night shoots. The stuck dial apparently seems to be a somewhat common fault for this and similar cameras. The fix varies from disassembly to sticking in electrical contact cleaner.
What do I think of it overall? For my use case of generally covering moving objects, the NX 3000 is not a good camera for such use.
Likely in the future will you see more of this camera,for the first day of used ownership, I find it to be a nice little piece of kit.
For photos for a more “amatuer” premise, the Samsung will contest a lot with the Panasonic HDC-SD40 camcorder, but both are distinctive in their own right.
~Linus
