Samsung NX 20 mm f/2.8
3. Build quality
What’s interesting, the Samsung 2.8/20 is noticeably bigger than its faster 2/30 cousin – you can see that much glancing at the photo below.
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The Samsung 2.8/20 starts with a metal mount with eight contacts. Inside the mount there is a rear element, about 15 mm in diameter. The element moves along the whole system, shifting by over half of a centimeter from the sensor when you pass to the minimum focus. With that shift a crack appears in the lens through which electronic parts are visible.
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Already on the proper casing of the lens you can find a red dot which makes the alignment with a body easier; right above it there is stated the focal length of the lens. What’s interesting, that casing element is made of plastics – in the 2.4/16 model it was made of metal. On the other side of the lens you get its serial number and the info that the lens was produced in China. It is also an interesting piece of information because other Samsung ‘pancakes’, tested by us, were made in Korea. It seems that not so long ago Samsung must have changed the localization of their production plants. The first version of the 2.4/16 lens we tested was made still in Korea but not so long ago we happened to examine a new specimen of the same lens which already featured the tell-tale inscription ‘Made in China’. With the 20-50 mm lenses it was a similar case: the first ‘kits’ of that type, added to the NX100 camera, were produced in Korea but the devices currently available on the market come already from China.
Let’s return to describing other parts of the casing, though. You are going to notice for sure an i-Function button, positioned on the left side of the instrument, which can be attributed one of many available functions in the body menu. It is less useful in more advanced bodies but, with the launch of NX1000 type cameras, in which the number of buttons on the casing is limited, the usefulness of the i-Function button increased significantly.
Moving on along the casing you meet a thin blue ring behind which there is a plastic, ribbed manual focus ring. It is 8 mm wide, works smoothly and is well-damped. The ring features electronic transmission so when the lens is not attached to a body the ring turns but doesn’t shift elements inside. Its transmission ratio is so slight that you can set the focus with a great precision. Passing from the infinity to the minimum focus you have to turn the ring through noticeably more than 500 degrees. Unfortunately the lens doesn’t feature any distance scale or depth of field scale.
In the front of the lens you can find a non-rotating filter thread with a diameter of 43 mm and a front element, slightly convex, with a diameter of 15 mm.
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When it comes to optical construction of the Samsung 2.8/20 you deal here with 6 elements positioned in 4 groups, one of them aspherical. Inside you can also find an aperture with seven diaphragm blades which can be closed down to f/22.
There were only caps added to the specimen we bought for our test.
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