Samsung 16mm f/2.4 Ultra Wide Pancake NX Lens Review

The Samsung 16mm f/2.4 Ultra Wide Pancake NX Lens is a small, fast, wide-angle lens, but it’s a bit pricey and shows soft corners at its widest aperture.

(3.5 out of 5)

The Samsung 16mm f/2.4 Ultra Wide Pancake NX Lens ($349 list) is currently the widest prime lens available for the NX camera system, equaling the field of view of a 24mm lens in full-frame 35mm photography. This gives your shots a very wide perspective that can be challenging to use—it’s much easier to skew the perspective of a photo by taking it at an off angle with such a wide lens—but it is rewarding when used effectively. The Samsung 20mm f/2.8 NX ($349) may be an overall more versatile wide-angle lens, as its perspective is less extreme, but it’s obviously not quite as wide as the 16mm optic.

The lens itself is a pancake design, although at 0.94 by 2.4 inches (HD) it protrudes almost a full inch further than the 0.85 by 2.4-inch Samsung 30mm NX Pancake Lens . It weighs only 2.6 ounces, allowing it to balance very well with compact Samsung NX cameras.

I tested the lens along with the Samsung NX1000 , which automatically applies distortion correction to both Raw and JPG files. According to Imatest, the in-camera correction reduces barrel distortion to a negligible 0.06 percent, which isn’t relevant at all to field shooting.

I also used Imatest to check the sharpness of the lens. At f/2.4 it’s quite sharp in the center—over 2,200 lines per picture height—but its overall score is a low 1,646 using a center-weighted metric. Stopping down to f/4 improves the performance across the board; the lens tops 2,000 lines there—better than the 1,800 lines required for a sharp photo. The lens is sharper than its equivalent for the Sony NEX system, the Sony SEL16F28 16mm f/2.8 Wide-Angle Lens ($249.99), which only managed 1,532 lines at f/2.8, improving to just 1,897 lines at f/5.6.

If you’re a wide-angle shooter and have bought into the NX system, the 16mm f/2.4 Ultra Wide Pancake NX Lens is right up your alley. It’s compact and, once you stop down to f/4 it sharpens up nicely. The lens may take some effort to master, making it easier to recommend the 20mm f/2.8 NX as a more useful wide-angle optic—but if you’re an NX shooter craving a wide perspective, this 16mm is a good way to go.

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By Jim Fisher, PCMag