Samsung's 2011 NX lens lineup

In the face of early February's partner announcements for Micro Four Thirds and Sony E-mount lenses, Samsung must be feeling the squeeze for its proprietary NX-mount interchangeable-lens camera (ILC) family. That may explain why Samsung's announcement of its entire 2011 NX lens roadmap now strikes me as a somewhat too-little-too-late-ish. Samsung offers an NX adapter for Pentax K-mount lenses, and Novoflex offers a variety of "dumb" adapters (which can't take advantage of the cameras' features), but these are hardly substitutes for real third-party lenses designed for the system.

More annoyingly, the company has, once again, refused to provide pricing, even for the products it expects to ship the soonest. The point of the announcements is to keep you from buying into a competing system, but witholding prices undercuts the warm-and-fuzzy feeling of future certainty the announcement is supposed to generate. But I'll view this as Samsung kindly providing us with the opportunity to use our imaginations. So let's play "The Price is Right."

In the summary table below, I've offered my valuation based on the slim specs provided by Samsung. If they look a bit low, that's because I've taken into account how small the NX ecosystem is and the typical quality of Samsung lenses. If they look high, well, then, oops.

Note that in addition to the features mentioned, all the lenses support i-Function, Samsung's technology that allows you to use one of the lens rings to adjust shutter speed, aperture, exposure compensation, white balance, and ISO sensitivity.

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