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A little time spent setting up the Samsung NX20 as you prefer will pay dividends. Images straight from the camera tend to have quite subdued colour and contrast, but this can be adjusted easily, via the provided presets, or manually to your taste.
The 221 segment evaluative metering system yields accurate exposures in a wide range of conditions, only requiring compensation for some high-contrast scenes, or subjects that are predominantly light or dark.
Auto white balance also performs well, leaving enough of a cast to retain the atmosphere of the conditions. Under cloudy conditions, images can have quite a strong cool cast, which can be remedied by selecting either the daylight or cloudy white balance presets.
For accurate colour under artificial lighting, the appropriate preset does an excellent job of correcting colour casts if the correction applied by the automatic setting isn't to your taste.
The benefits of a large APS-C sensor really show with the noise performance of the Samsung NX20. Images taken at sensitivities up to ISO 800 show no significant signs of noise. Noise is even difficult to spot with the ISO raised to 1600, although a little softening can be seen in areas of fine detail, due to noise reduction.
At higher sensitivities, softening due to noise reduction increases, but even ISO 3200 should be able to make respectable A4 (11.7 x 8.3-inch) sized prints. The lack of coloured noise speckles at ISO 6400 means that images still look good, despite obvious softening due to noise reduction.
Although ISO 12800 shows much higher noise levels, and should be reserved for times where picture taking isn't otherwise possible, images taken at this setting should be more than adequate for sharing at low resolutions on the web, or for postcard sized prints.
Autofocus on the Samsung NX20 is reasonably quick when shooting still images, locking onto static subjects quickly and accurately. Tracking moving subjects can be a challenge, though.
During video, autofocus is slow, and there is no confirmation on the screen of when the camera has achieved focus, or even where it has focused in the frame. Low light AF performance is pretty good for a compact system camera, only hunting in very dark conditions.
