Samsung has created some remarkable smart camera’s as part of the Tizen-based NX range, with the Samsung NX1 being their last flagship device. The story started once upon a time with the NX300M, the first camera powered by Tizen, which was announced onstage at the Tizen Developer Summit (TDS) 2013 by Jong-Deok Choi, who at the time was Executive Vice President Samsung and Co-chair Tizen Technical Steering Group. Well, the smart camera had previously been announced and shipping at this point, the fact that it was powered by Tizen was the main thing that was announced at TDS.
Samsung has brought out several Tizen cameras after the NX300M, such as the NX100, NX1000, NX30, NX500 and NX1 – there might be others to complete this list. The NX1 was the last flagship that was released by Samsung.
Now, Industry sources are hinting that Samsung are ready to exit the camera business altogether. For us, at Tizen Experts, this doesn’t come as a huge surprise as the last smart camera released by the Korean tech giant was the NX500 in March 2015. We have already covered that Samsung to quite UK camera market in December 2015. The fact there were no new cameras and no new firmware updates for existing cameras were also big giveaways.
Samsung’s exit from the camera market is said to be down to the digital market slowing down as not everyone needs a year on year upgrade and competition from the smartphone market is aggressive, as their optics are amazing, when you look at phones like the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge, iPhone 7 Plus, Pixel XL, HTC 10, Huawei P9, LG G6 and Sony Xperia XZ. Veterans of the camera Industry such as Canon and Nikon, who have more than 100 years of history here, are also struggling in the premium market.
Samsung Gear 360 and Gear VR are the new direction that Samsung wants to now take, seeing this as their future in 360-degree optics and immersive experiences with the Gear VR. In April last year, the company unveiled the Gear 360 camera in its latest push for virtual reality technologies. This year we have already seen the Gear 360 2017 being unveiled at Samsung unpacked and this model improves on the previous model with a f/2.2 Aperture, 30MP still image resolution, USB-C charging and 4K video recording.
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