A few days ago I wrote about Samsung's missed opportunity with its photography-oriented smartphone, the Galaxy S4 Zoom, arguing for a bolder approach to the marriage of connectivity and higher quality image-making. Today Samsung announced the Galaxy NX, an interchangeable lens camera that runs on the Android 4.2 OS. And quite unlike the S4 Zoom, this announcement could one day be seen as the dawn of a new era of camera control for enthusiasts.
Leveraging its unique position as manufacturer of both smartphones and mirrorless cameras, Samsung has certainly aimed high, combining the 20MP APS-C sensor and lens mount from its NX300 camera with a 4.8-inch AMOLED touchscreen display that's nearly as large as that on their flagship Galaxy S4 smartphone. The Galaxy NX has an electronic viewfinder and can capture raw format images. Camera and gadget sites are providing all of the usual specs and features coverage, although Samsung has not released pricing and availability information yet. Reviewers who have had their hands on prototypes have unanimously (and rightly so) lamented the lack of external buttons and controls, features any photo enthusiast would demand, particularly from a DSLR-sized camera.
Yet the big story here is not so much how successful the Galaxy NX is as a purely photographic device. After all, both the camera sensor and range of NX lenses are well-known quantities. The truly bold move lies in incorporating the Android OS and such a large, high-end display on an enthusiast camera. For all of their advances over the past decade, DSLRs have largely followed a familiar control interface. You press a button and/or rotate a dial to control one setting at a time until you've achieved the desired exposure or camera adjustment. Last year we saw
With a camera powered by a robust OS like Android, however, what if you could have customizable onscreen Function buttons that could be dragged to a preferred location on the screen? Or a collection of saved user settings, that with one tap could set multiple aspects of the camera's behavior to your liking? And put a nearly 5-inch display on the back of a camera and you've opened up a world of possibilities that go beyond Samsung's current camera app implementation. Not only is your camera powered by an OS designed completely around touch and gestures, but one that has a large stable of third party developers who will undoubtedly come up with novel ways of interacting with the camera and your images.
Anyone who's had the opportunity to shoot with film-era medium or large format camera knows the pleasures of composing via a bright, clear ground glass. It has an almost meditative effect and pulls you into the scene you're trying to create, allowing external distractions to melt away. By devoting nearly the entire back of the Galaxy NX to a high-resolution display, Samsung is moving technology forward while looking back to these early days of the photographic medium.
So while we all pore over spec sheets in the coming days and speculate on issues such as camera responsiveness and battery life, let's also take the oportunity to re-imagine how we want to interact with an enthusiast-level photographic device. The possibilities are almost limitless and Samsung has just given us a peek at one of them.
