INTERESTING title don’t you think? I couldn’t come up with something cute so I came up with something to get your attention.

Yesterday afternoon I attended, Samsung Forum 2010, and when I stepped back and reflected I realised that Samsung is one heck of a giant. Hence, my comment that they’re going to conquer the world. They’ll do so with gadgets, gizmos, and FMCG (fast moving consumer goods). One of the presenters noted that Samsung can do what it is doing today because they leverage on the fact that they do a LOT of things and each of their other verticals can make use of a LOT of those other things. The simplest example (hypothetical) is in making the Samsung NX10. Let’s say it needs memory, processor, operating system and so on. Well, Samsung makes memory, they also have processors and certainly have done their own operating system. The camera division can then focus on building the camera and not fret over the little things. There are other companies doing this and they promote themselves as doing this – make lenses, ASICs, blah, blah, blah…I think you know who.

So, at the event they talked about washing machines, microwaves, vacuum cleaners, notebooks, monitors, 3D television and the thing that interested me – digital cameras. The 3D TV was impressive as Samsung will support the 3D technology on good old Plasma technology, LCD and LED televisions. There was some pretty impressive panels on display (punny) and one that was so thin that taking a photograph of it just seemed futile since the profile was ridiculously thin. (I did take a photo but you wouldn’t have a sense of scale and depth since it is so thin.) This forum did not have or mention any mobile phone related products.

Oh yah, there was also mention of an e-book reader device that will be connected and to be slightly different it has a handwriting input/capture. One thing to note about the handwriting input/capture is that there is currently no recognition.

On with the main event, my focus, at that is the Samsung NX10 digital camera. An impressive little device that features an APS-C CMOS sensor versus a MicroFour Thirds. So the imaging sensor is larger but they still compacted the camera down and have interchangeable lenses. By the way, the NX10 was launched at CES earlier last month but the additional news is the line-up of additional lenses coming

The NX10 packs:

• 14.6-Megapixel APS-C CMOS Sensor
• Samsung NX Mount (K-Mount and other mounts likely to be made available through third party manufacturers)
• 3.0-inch AMOLED (VGA Resolution)
• Electronic Viewfinder (EVF)
• 720p HD movie recording (MPF/h.264)
• Dust Removal
• ISO 100-3200
• Built-in Pop-up flash
• 3 lense types available now
• 353 grams

I took the opportunity to snap some photos and for comparison I snapped a photo with the NX10 and then positioned and show a similar photograph with a Canon EOS 7D. The images you see below are JPEGs (I didn’t take the time to dig into the NX10 for a RAW capture setting. The Canon is actually captured at a lower pixel resolution (7D=8-Megapixel 3456 x 2304 / NX10=14-Megapixel 4592 x 3056) than the NX10 as I had set and was playing with the EOS 7D to shoot the biggest RAW + a M sized JPG.

I also recorded a video clip @ 720p. I hope this gives you and idea of the quality. I’m crossing my fingers that I’ll get my paws on a media review set soon so I can give y’all a more complete rundown of the device and the accessories.

Moving along another digital camera device that caught my attention – the HMX U20. The most obvious reason for the HMX-U20 to be of interest to i-digITall is that I’ve already reviewed Toshiba’s Camileo and the Creative VadoHD via VR-Zone’s website. Check out the video recorded with the U20 and a still pic at 10-megapixels.

HMX-U20 Camcorder specifications