The battle for 1” sensor supremacy heats up! We post Samsung NX Mini First Shots

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posted Tuesday, May 20, 2014 at 10:43 AM EST

To call the Samsung NX Mini "small" isn't really doing it justice. Plenty of cameras are small these days, even some ILC's like the amazingly compact Panasonic GM1. A more appropriate description for the NX Mini is "svelte" - sporting clean lines and showcasing rather astonishing engineering to achieve this level of compactness in an ILC camera.

So that's the look on the outside, now let's take a closer look on the inside. The NX Mini is built around a 1" backside illuminated sensor, and if that sounds familiar, this is the same basic configuration as found in the popular Sony RX100 line including the soon to be released RX100 III, as well as the Nikon 1 series line which now boasts its latest offering - the Nikon V3.

The NX Mini enters the market with a base price of US$449 for the kit with the 9mm prime lens (the same lens used for our lab test images) and is thus priced more aggressively than the RX100 III with an MSRP of US$800, and far more aggressively than the V3 with a kit MSRP of US$1200.

In order to see how the "world's smallest and lightest ILC" stacks up against the competition we offer up our lab test First Shots, which allow you to see how well the NX Mini performs across the ISO spectrum in lab test images and to also pit the images side-by-side against the other 1" sensored competitors or any other camera we've ever tested using our Comparometer.

To get you started, below are crop comparisons from our Still Life target at ISO 800 / 100% resolution showing the NX Mini against the Sony RX100 II and the Nikon V3.