[clackers]

Samsung spend billions of dollars a year on marketing, a huge amount compared to their competitors. This will be just a tiny drop in the bucket.

They're much newer to the consumer electronics game than the Japanese, Christine, so they're still very clumsy e.g. awkward presentations/launches.

But they've got deep pockets which seem to fund a lot of experiments.

Some on the forum seem to have gone ga ga over the NX!

---------- Post added 09-30-14 at 09:11 AM ----------

How come no one is offended by "chimping"?

Yes, Rupert, better not to offend the all-powerful chimp photographer lobby group:

---

Last edited by clackers; 09-29-2014 at 04:12 PM.

[reeftool]

Given the current state of the magazine business, I would imagine most magazines would be more than happy to provide several pages of ads for a paying customer.

[Christine Tham]

They're much newer to the consumer electronics game than the Japanese, Christine, so they're still very clumsy e.g. awkward presentations/launches.

But they've got deep pockets which seem to fund a lot of experiments.

You are right about the clumsiness, and they've had quite a few marketing gaffes.

They don't seem to have good follow through - they launched a big developer push, and yet no one is developing Samsung apps. Then they launched a big health initiative to pre-empt Apple, but again it's all vapourware. And multiple iterations of watches running different operating systems, plus releasing a variant of Galaxy every five minutes.

As a consumer, I have no confidence buying any of their products. After sales support is zero, and they don't create a pleasant user experience unlike Apple. And if I buy a flagship product like the latest Galaxy, it will be obsolete within months and I'll get Android updates months later, if at all. Not a great strategy for creating customer loyalty and satisfaction.

I also have issues with their ethics. Leaving aside the whole issue of copying Apple, they also engage in shady practices all over the world. Cheating on benchmarks, paying bloggers to write good reviews of their products and slamming their competitors, denying factory safety issues that killed their workers for years and then suing a company that tried to make a documentary about it, before finally admitting yes it's all true (years after causing suffering to the families of workers killed).

The NX1 seems like a great camera, on paper. However, I have been burnt too often by shoddy Samsung products to care.

[Rupert]

Yes, Rupert, better not to offend the all-powerful chimp photographer lobby group:

Pimps pimping and Chimps chimping.....what's the world coming to!

Regards!

[jcdoss]

Come on Rupert... everyone here knows you're a chimp pimper.

[Rupert]

Come on Rupert... everyone here knows you're a chimp pimper.

Well, they didn't know it before you blurted it out here in public!

Regards!

[Stavri]

The marketing commotion on the NX1 reached my ear early, it made me seek more info about this product. Since Samsung is paying hand over fist for advertising space and given their willingness to pay for good reviews in the past (who knows how much DPreview is getting for their "in-depth" coverage of their product) I for one will take any future reviews with a grain of salt, focusing on first hand customer experiences than websites

---

Last edited by Stavri; 09-30-2014 at 12:24 PM.

[Christine Tham]

The marketing commotion on the NX1 reached my ear early, it made me seek more info about this product. Since Samsung is paying hand over fist for advertising space and given their willingness to pay for good reviews in the past (who knows how much DPreview is getting for their "in-depth" coverage of their product) I for one will take any future reviews with a grain of salt, focusing on first hand customer experiences than websites

It's a very good attitude to take.

I was burnt badly by supposedly positive reviews. I bought the Samsung 840 EVO 1TB SSD - it gathered rave reviews from Anandtech and Tom's Hardware and they essentially said it was the best SSD in the 1TB capacity. It blitzed all the benchmarks.

Real life performance was disappointing. It performed significantly worse than my Sandisk Extreme day to day use, and often it would lock up the computer for minutes during boot up so that it could do some "housecleaning".

Clearly, Samsung had optimised the drive to perform really well in benchmarks, but less well in actual use. That shows that their whole focus is on making numbers look good, and they don't care about actual customer experience. It's borderline misleading.

Similar experience with Samsung vs Sandisk SD cards. I notice that if Sandisk says their card speed is X (45 Mbps, 90 Mbps etc.) I will get exactly that when I transfer images from card to computer. I bought a bunch of Samsung SD cards rated at 80, but I typically only get 70-75 Mbps. Again, seems to me Samsung stretches the truth in their specs.

[reeftool]

Clearly, Samsung had optimised the drive to perform really well in benchmarks, but less well in actual use.

Samsung got slammed pretty hard over this in their smart phone division. They got caught. It seem their phones have built in software in the firmware that detects all the major benchmarking programs and optimizes the settings to perform well. In everyday use, their phones aren't quite as fast as the benchmarks make them out to be. After Samsung got caught, it was soon discovered that others were doing the same thing. So much for benchmarks.

Going back many years, I have generally had very good luck with Samsung products. My first Samsung product was a cheap color TV back in the late 70's. It never died. I sold it in a garage sale. I bought a microwave oven in 1988 when our youngest daughter was born. It was still working fine in 2001 when I gave it to our oldest daughter when we moved into the house we have now. I bought a 35mm Samsung camera back in the early 90's with a 38-145 Schneider zoom that was a superb camera. It traveled with me on motorcycle trips for quick shots and ended up getting more use than my SLR's because I got such good results.

Samsung is sinking a lot of money into lots of products. I think they are into more stuff than Sony. My wife has one of their phones. It's OK but I prefer iOS. As for advertising their cameras, they may overdo it but consider that Pentax went for years with hardly any marketing at all, at least here in the US. Samsung is one of the largest memory makers in the world and also flash memory. Most of it is sold under other brands than their own. I think their biggest problem in the photo business is that they aren't taken very seriously. Their reputation for years was a value brand. A reliable product that was cheaper than everybody else.

[mecrox]

Samsung got slammed pretty hard over this in their smart phone division. They got caught. It seem their phones have built in software in the firmware that detects all the major benchmarking programs and optimizes the settings to perform well. In everyday use, their phones aren't quite as fast as the benchmarks make them out to be. After Samsung got caught, it was soon discovered that others were doing the same thing. So much for benchmarks.

Going back many years, I have generally had very good luck with Samsung products. My first Samsung product was a cheap color TV back in the late 70's. It never died. I sold it in a garage sale. I bought a microwave oven in 1988 when our youngest daughter was born. It was still working fine in 2001 when I gave it to our oldest daughter when we moved into the house we have now. I bought a 35mm Samsung camera back in the early 90's with a 38-145 Schneider zoom that was a superb camera. It traveled with me on motorcycle trips for quick shots and ended up getting more use than my SLR's because I got such good results.

Samsung is sinking a lot of money into lots of products. I think they are into more stuff than Sony. My wife has one of their phones. It's OK but I prefer iOS. As for advertising their cameras, they may overdo it but consider that Pentax went for years with hardly any marketing at all, at least here in the US. Samsung is one of the largest memory makers in the world and also flash memory. Most of it is sold under other brands than their own. I think their biggest problem in the photo business is that they aren't taken very seriously. Their reputation for years was a value brand. A reliable product that was cheaper than everybody else.

Where I live, all their products are on one monster local site which, perhaps inevitably, has a lot on mobile phones, tablets and televisions. On the page covering cameras, there is a section called "Recommended for You". Expecting cameras or lenses, I found my "recommendations" included hifi speakers and a washing machine. On refreshing the page, I found instead a ShowCase fridge and a LAN adapter. Not really, thanks all the same.

[K-9]

Have you ever seen anyone lining up a week before a Samsung product is released?

I'm not sure how "lining up" is a measuring stick for anything.

Regardless, no one should be lining up for any electronic product that is first released. They'll be plenty more next week, so have patience people. I laughed so hard at the iphone6 lines two weeks ago. It's like their iPhone 5's were not going to last another day.

[Christine Tham]

Samsung got slammed pretty hard over this in their smart phone division. They got caught. It seem their phones have built in software in the firmware that detects all the major benchmarking programs and optimizes the settings to perform well. In everyday use, their phones aren't quite as fast as the benchmarks make them out to be. After Samsung got caught, it was soon discovered that others were doing the same thing. So much for benchmarks.

Yep, I remember that. Others caught cheating include LG, HTC. I don't think Motorola or Google (Nexus) cheated.

And certainly not Apple. Have you noticed Apple phones are under-speced compared to Android and yet perform better in real life? Apple optimises the overall experience rather than meaningless numbers and playing the spec oneupmanship game. My 3GS was workable right until I retired it last year, and it gave me 4 years of usable life. I am still using the 4S on a daily basis, and Apple has kept it updated with the latest iOS.

I don't think there is a single Android device still supported after 3 years and running the latest version of the OS (Google's policy on Nexus devices is 18 months). Which means they are a huge security risk - malware running on Android has become a serious issue.

Sorry, got a bit off topic there.

[Pentaxor]

Yep, I remember that. Others caught cheating include LG, HTC. I don't think Motorola or Google (Nexus) cheated.

And certainly not Apple. Have you noticed Apple phones are under-speced compared to Android and yet perform better in real life? Apple optimises the overall experience rather than meaningless numbers and playing the spec oneupmanship game. My 3GS was workable right until I retired it last year, and it gave me 4 years of usable life. I am still using the 4S on a daily basis, and Apple has kept it updated with the latest iOS.

I don't think there is a single Android device still supported after 3 years and running the latest version of the OS (Google's policy on Nexus devices is 18 months). Which means they are a huge security risk - malware running on Android has become a serious issue.

Sorry, got a bit off topic there.

out of topic and inaccurate. please stick to the topic rather than ire your personal bias.

[Christine Tham]

out of topic and inaccurate. please stick to the topic rather than ire your personal bias.

Agree that it is out of topic and inappropriate to this forum.

Disagree that it is inaccurate, but we don't need to debate any further, here or elsewhere.

[Pentaxor]

Agree that it is out of topic and inappropriate to this forum.

Disagree that it is inaccurate, but we don't need to debate any further, here or elsewhere.

please do stop. I agree that there is no need to debate on this as you can search it online whether your statements are indeed accurate and hopefully not motivated by brand loyalty as it obviously is showing. this is not an Apple Versus Samsung topic. reserve those useless debates elsewhere but not here. thank you.