Samsung's abandoned NX cameras can be brought online with a $20 LTE stick (opens in new tab)

> Its crazy to me that there isn't a modern version of this kind of camera.

There is, I own one, and it has every feature in your list! YONGNUO YN455, Android-10-powered 20MP Micro Four Thirds camera: https://www.hkyongnuo.com/productinfo/660161.html

LTE band compatibility would be an issue for many, but I have it working successfully on T-Mobile US. I don't prefer using it for stills over my Panasonic/Olympus bodies, but I love it for video.

Here's what it looks like: https://i.imgur.com/3mdBWXt.jpeg (my photo, with Laowa 6mm Cinema lens)

And here's what it sees: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzlBA2wSU7w

Stating the obvious, the market decided that the opposite would happen, i.e. that the smartphones would take away the market share of camera manufacturers instead. Smartphone camera experience is good enough for most people and smartphones offer other features as well.

It seems like the consumer market was completely destroyed by smartphones, used by people who don't particularly care about image quality, and the professional market is people who do RAW shooting with image file sizes of 40..90MB, with post-processing on a PC.

Seems like the niche between those markets never was large enough to warrant this functionality, given that both mobile standards and cloud service APIs change multiple times over the lifetime of a camera.

It's not Crazy because you outlined all the ways it breaks or goes obsolete without a lot of maintanence...

- GPS doesn't count, although 'corrections' can be interesting.

- IDK you can totally do a workflow with a Sony camera to send to a phone/etc, may not be full-auto but I've done it.

- As a 'shooter' I'd rather get proper SD card redundancy on less-high end models than see a flash buffer for that isn't already present in how things work

- My a6000 had decent wifi speeds at the start, but it's hard to keep up with standards, also it's hard to get around the 'noise' of other wifi devices without making the camera larger or complicating the design for the sake of a wifi antenna.

- LTE is a continually moving target, adds cost for a marginal set of users that will bother to set it up.

- Everyone who's tried even a small amount of this never got far.

- Moving target. You're better off using DxO PhotoLab or Lightroom and keeping that up to date.

Mind you, this viewpoint is coming from the 'minmaxer'. Aside from my a6700 (and before that my a6000) I keep one 'main' camera as well as one or more 'cheap bodies' (i.e. store floor models or previous camera).

This makes it easier to do shots with different focal ranges without a lens change...

Pros will often have multiple bodies (but will be more discerning than 'oh hey 150$ with a lens lets goooooooo') and thus will have similar concerns...

At least Sony cameras can do automatic uploads either directly from camera, or tethered to phone. Afaik its primarily aimed at (sports) photojournalists who need to get photos out as quickly as possible, basically you can have editor pick up photos in near real-time. At least the couple models I checked advertise 2.4/5GHz 802.11ac wifi, so that seems like it should be decent enough. For geotagging, it should work fine if you have tethered to your phone.

Samsung actually released multiple Android-based cameras: the Galaxy Camera range with built-in zoom lenses (https://www.zisman.ca/blog/2013-01-05.html) and the Galaxy NX with interchangeable lenses: https://op-co.de/blog/posts/galaxy_nx/

They all suffered from running Android 4.x with no major upgrades from Samsung.

- Sony briefly had a 'screenless' series of 'smart lens' cameras around 2014 - the Sony QX1 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_ILCE-QX1 ), QX10, QX30 and QX100 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSC-QX100 ) where you brought your smartphone to act as the screen. I think the concept at the time was just too abstract and clunky since it meant clamping on the camera to a phone, and probably had latency issues. They've also tried to make some high-end smartphones with better camera apps but it was a niche audience.

- RED also had some smartphones with a connector interface to supposedly add cameras, but the product line flopped pretty quickly.

Almost everyone already has a camera that has all of these features in their smartphone that they already carry with them.

That limits the market for a second device that is a better camera with all those features but not a smartphone.

Of course, computational photography combined with a proper lens and better sensor would be amazing, but it'd be a niche product and expensive (since it would be made in small numbers, and require expensive compute and much more RAM than current phones tend to have).

> Its crazy to me that there isn't a modern version of this kind of camera

You can bluetooth-pair (most) modern 'pocket' cameras with your phone to get this functionality.

(And for the uninitiated; such cameras will have infinitely better picture quality than can be provided by lenses than fit in a phone. I always take such a camera where carrying a full-blown SLR would be a pain the in the arse).

Their cameras weren’t actually all that good at being cameras. Having used one it was a frustrating experience of constantly missing shots because of how slow it was to turn on. In comparison Sony was near instant.

Rather than going by camera, wifi SD cards were a lot of fun back in the day. I wonder how much you can do with the modern smaller form factor of modern SD cards. Could pair it up with an app on your phone via Bluetooth etc to retrofit more features on. Much like an Apple Shortcuts/CloudKit.

Would be a fun retrofuturist experiment to backport fun newer things to old tech with big SD cards.

Sounds like things haven't improved much in the past twenty years based on links like these:

https://nerdtechy.com/best-wifi-sd-card

https://old.reddit.com/r/photography/comments/12ocr4u/the_wi...

Battery, space, and startup time limitations probably. As it is mirrorless cameras can only get like 350 frames per charge, so adding more power hungry features like GPS or LTE would only make thay worse. Camera bodies are packed as is, so having a limited amount of fixed storage (when there is perfectly good removable options) take up valuable space is not an especially appealing trade off. And lastly / most importantly, I need a camera to be ready to go as soon as I turn it on, I don't have time to wait for a full OS to boot up. Standby mode could mitigate that but see previous concerns about battery life.

> - Built in GPS for location tagging in photos(a few cameras have this but for many you need an external dongle attached to the camera)

Sony's lineup actually has support for precisely that in the pinout of the MI Shoe which all their cameras since over a decade use [1].

Unfortunately, the <insert swear word of choice> at Sony never released a GPS dongle, and while there has been root available for all Sony Alpha models up until the A7S2 via the integrated (fossil and cut-down...) Android subsystem and they all run Linux, to my knowledge no one has reverse engineered the MI shoe comms interface, how to get that ruddy thing into being a wifi client instead of that temporary hotspot crap, or how to make it behave like a goddamn normal UVC webcam over USB instead of needing their brutally unstable client app.

Sony makes truly best-in-class hardware (no one else has a competitor for the S series in a low-light scenario) at the best possible price point... but damn no matter what hardware they're dealing with, they're the typical Japanese company that cannot get software right.

Rant over.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi_Interface_Shoe

If you have all that why not also make it a phone?

Sony used to have a whole Android subsystem on their Alpha cameras. It kind of surprised me more 3rd party stuff didn't come out that took advantage of this programmability. https://github.com/ma1co/Sony-PMCA-RE

I think the Zeiss ZX1 has most of this, LTE aside (which shouldn't be a problem seeing as it runs Android)

https://www.zeiss.co.uk/consumer-products/photography/zx1.ht...

Funny, I don't want any of those features (besides storage), and turn off Location Services on my other devices. Not that the tech isn't cool, but you can't trust a tech company to not sell you out these days.

I bought our recent camera and steered clear of any cloud or internet integration at all. USB-C is fine, and snappy as hell, thanks. SD Card as well.

It sounds like you are describing a smartphone with a traditional camera form factor?

Add the ability to make calls and you are really on to something here!

Cloud connection, wifi, flash storage, apps, computational photography, and I assume some sort of display screen ... You basically want a phone that does everything except make calls?

So, a lot of what you list is missing. But the canon 6d mkii has WiFi, and GPS. Allowing some of those features if tethered / connected to another device.

While it doesn't tick all the boxes you're talking about, you might be interested in the Pixii rangefinder cameras.

Damn expensive though.

I used to do a lot of shooting with my Canon 5D. I had thousands of dollars in various lenses, plus some specialized flashes, etc. It took great pictures, but all that gear was bulky and heavy.

99% of the time I wasn't taking pictures with the intent of blowing them up to poster-size prints, or selling them to major publications. I was just taking pictures to document and share elements of day to day life.

(You probably see where this is going).

Smartphone cameras have kept up well enough with most consumer needs that it would be really hard to justify carrying a dedicated camera. Further, that camera would need to have all of the features of a smart phone camera (eg: filters, touchscreen, lightweight editing, etc. As you also pointed out) that it makes it unlikely to exist in a practical manner.

I will say I'm slightly surprised we haven't see an external "lens and sensor only" gadget that pairs with a phone. Use this gadget to capture a better raw image, and then use the phone to do everything else. Could be a USB/cable tether, or even some form of wireless (bluetooth is probably too slow though?).

tl;dr - I'm not carrying a dedicated camera around, no matter how much better the images might be.

> - Run apps for upload to a variety of services

... why?

You have a smartphone for photoing your food. Why there should be an option to upload to some service? What would you do when the service (or OS itself) became discontinued, just like in TFA?

> Automatic backup of photos to cloud/network storage locations

An another LTE modem which would be obsolete again in a couple of years? And eating money while it is supported?

+1 I would absolutely buy this.

Uh sir. I already have a phone that does this.

The compact models are probably not competitive to modern smartphones, except if you need optical zoom.

The NX series interchangeable lens cameras however don't fare too badly compared to today's models, and have a good price-point on the used market, if you are ready to do some bargain hunting.

In the last decade, the improvements were largely in sensor resolutions (from 20MP to 40MP, not relevant for most practical uses) and in "smart" auto-focus, with better tracking of eyes, animals or objects.

I have an NX Mini (which isn't exactly the same as the regular NX line) which has a "1 inch" sensor and a 3-lens interchangeable system. With the 9mm fixed lens it's as pocketable as a phone, but with a flip-out screen, a real flash and otherwise much better quality. With the 9-27mm zoom lens it's even a reasonable portrait camera. I haven't found one of the 17mm f/1.8 lenses, they're pretty rare.

Anyway, I really like that little thing. With a C-mount lens adapter I can use surveillance camera lenses which is pretty fun.

This is definitely not “worth it” given that NX is a dead platform, but I can totally see it being a passion project for someone who wants to improve the system. The NX cameras were pretty darn good. The NX1, which was the final flagship of the range, was an amazing camera IMO, and of course these cameras can produce excellent images (better than modern smartphones) with their APS-C sensors. Photography is all about light, so smartphones with tiny sensors will always be disadvantaged. Computational photography tries to work around the physical limitations, but it also yields some very unnatural results. Personally, I prefer traditional cameras where the bokeh is real and there’s no built-in adjustment to the image.

Vintage digital cameras, especially the sony ones that use floppy disks, are now "retro" and in fashion with zoomers, apparently.

edit: Many of these aren't that old, the last NX was 2015, I still use a pentax APS-C DSLR around that age and it's fine.

Just having exchangeable lenses is a huge boon. The sensor is probably worse than what you can find in a modern smart phone, but phones simply don't have the space for deep lenses and thus have to emulate effects like zoom and depth-of-field. On this camera you can have the "real" thing without paying $1000+ for a DSLR and $300+ for a lens.

And of course there's the effect where for every sufficiently popular camera their technical deficiencies become a desirable vintage look, given enough time. Kind of like people preferring vinyl records for their sound

The big problem with the NX cameras is that they are no longer supported and won’t ever get more lenses. If happy with kit lens or adapting manual lenses, then they are probably cheaper than other mirrorless.

Can't say for this camera specifically, but expensive lenses and larger pixel sizes usually do what they are worth in cash. There's no viable way around paying more, like trying to milk phone cameras with AI enhancements. At least for the glass.

The hashtag on one of the original author’s tweets is “ShittyCameraChallenge” and the photos don’t look great, so I think it’s mostly about reviving dead tech and learning.

"Worth it" is relative. No camera phone can beat pictures from my Leica Q3 with it's full-frame 61MP sensor. Especially if it is anything but ultra bright out there.

But like you said it's an enthusiast thing. Photos are a hobby of mine. If you don't really care about having the best look and quality and are fine with good quality a 48MP RAW iPhone pic can be edited quite nicely with Photoshop nowadays. Even for large screens to enjoy them on.

If you don't care at all, snap away with any semi-new phone and pictures will be good enough for phone screen/sharing.

I don't know if "ultra portable" is referring to a specific kind of camera type, but I got a Sony ZV-1 on black friday last year, and since then it has been my go-to camera over both my DSLR and smart phone. I usually just carry it in my pocket instead of my phone these days, but I also can fit it in my pocket with my phone if I want to.

People who want separate non-ilc camera are already niche. People who want to compromise image quality and ergonomics for ultracompactness is small niche within that niche. Its not like something Fujis X100, Sonys ZV, or Ricohs are huge cameras

I'm not sure you can get much more portable than the Ricoh GR, and it is an excellent camera.

The market has changed, its not too surprising. That said you can get your ricoh gr still.

There's a lot of hand-wringing in the micro-four-thirds camera community about why Panasonic and OM Systems haven't released any updates to their older small/portable cameras (which the M43 system was great for, the lenses being much smaller than APS-C and full-frame). It's likely there's just no money in it and so they're focusing on more $$ niche tiers instead, with larger bodies. (Panasonic on video, OM Systems on bird/nature photography).

Fujifilm is having great success with their fixed-lens X100V, though.

My older Olympus camera does the opposite. Becomes an AP and then the phone app switches WiFi networks and connects that way. It's an interesting approach but the problem is that Android and iOS get up to wonky unpredictable action when dealing with private ad-hoc wifi networks, so the situ becomes unreliable. (this was a vexing problem when I worked on the Google WiFi some years ago). That and the wifi range is terrible, and it's a drain on the camera's batteries.

petabyt I'm interested in this capability, is this available out of the box? What's the client API/contract? Or is Fujihack [0] required? (I just found it on your website.)

[0] https://fujihack.org/

As someone with mild knowledge of semiconductor fabrication and optics, I honestly think these technology are not that meaningful to justify their cost of development and implementation, compared to the winning solution of arbitrarily complex plastic lens assemblies.

Chromatic aberration can be good enough with doublet lens design and Petzval is largely solved by the final field flattener usually with multiple concave and convex sections, and you can still easily fit a large number of lenses in a small formfactor.

Additionally being able to adjust the power of a lens is not a huge gamechanger, as a lot of the complexity with modern optic design is to counter various defects and distortion like aforementioned Petzval.

Rather, the fundamental limit is the sensor size. It's just not practical to achieve much better image quality with a physically small system

Thanks! We've changed the URL to that from https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/07/samsungs-abandoned-n... above.

Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

They are proper cameras, with proper camera-sized sensors, and some model had interchangable lenses. One of them, for better or for worse, even came with Android. https://op-co.de/blog/posts/galaxy_nx/