60mm lens

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.

18-200mm lens

More annoyingly, the company has, once again, refused to provide pricing, even for the products it expects to ship 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.

 ' 18-200mm f3.5-6.3 ED OIS 16mm F2.4 60mm F2.8 Macro ED OIS SSA 85mm F1.4 ED SSA 16-80mm F3.5-4.5 OIS Special features Voice Coil Motor (VCM) for quiet movie operation  ' SuperSonic Acutator (SSA) for speed SSA VCM Comments Sounds like a typical general-purpose alternative kit lens, but it gets very slow (narrow aperture) towards the end of the range. A me-too fast, wide-angle pancake-prime offering Seems like a nice macro option. What looks to be the highest-end lens option for the NX mount, it has the potential to be a decent portrait lens. This really should be available earlier in the year, as it sounds like a better kit lens alternative than the standard 18-55mm model currently offered. I wouldn't pay more than... $349 $299 $399 $699 $499 Ship May 2011 July 2011 August 2011 October 2011 December 2011