Dynamic range
Image: Bringing back the Levels of this image shows there is plenty of detail present in shadow areas
Shooting in a variety of daylight and low-light conditions, and even scenes of high contrast, there were no noticeable issues with the NX100’s dynamic range. The camera produces images with a good dynamic range and strong midtones. At its lowest sensitivity setting, the NX100 has a range of around 11EV, which is very good for its class.
Smart range is the name for Samsung’s dynamic range optimiser, which is particularly useful in scenes of high contrast. When activated, lost details in the shadow areas and more limited highlight detail in the image are recovered. I have found that dynamic range optimisers tend to leave images a little flat.
Generally, I opted not to use the smart range, because when editing some of my images I found that I could bring back a lot of detail from dark shadow areas during post-processing. This demonstrates that the NX100 is capable of retaining a lot of detail and only in the case of severely burnt-out highlights is the information not recoverable.
