Samsung 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 OIS Lens

Samsung’s 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 OIS covers the typical focal length range of a standard kit lens.  Built to a price, it nevertheless offers desirable features like built-in optical stabilisation and comes with a clip-on, petal-shaped lens hood (which some manufacturers omit).  It’s also surprisingly small for a camera with an APS-C sized sensor, at just over half the weight of similar lenses supplied with APS-C DSLRs.

Constructed with 12 elements in nine groups, the 18-55mm lens includes one aspherical element to correct common aberrations. It has seven diaphragm blades that close to a circular aperture and offers a minimum focus of 28 cm with a maximum magnification of roughly 0.22 times.

The Samsung 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 OIS kit lens for NX series cameras.

This lens is made almost entirely of black polycarbonate and is a good match for the NX10 body. Built quality is quite good for the price of this lens. However, the plastic lens mount is something of a letdown, particularly since metal mounts have been provided for the other lenses released with the NX10.

Extending approximately 70 mm out from the camera body (with lens cap attached) at the 18mm position, it protrudes roughly 35 mm further at the 55mm focal length. The focusing ring is a narrow band between 15 and 20mm back from the front of the lens barrel with thin parallel ridges to provide a grip.

Although narrow, it’s in proportion to the rest of the lens and relatively easy to use. However, on the review lens, it was quite free-moving and difficult to focus with high  precision. It also turns through a full 360 degrees, regardless of whether the lens is set for auto or manual focusing.
The zoom ring is a ridged, rubber-coated, 15 mm wide band closer to the camera body. It turns through just under a quarter of a turn as you move from the 18mm to the 55mm focal length. There’s no distance scale, no depth-of-field indicator and no markings for infrared focus correction.

On the left side of the main barrel are two sliders; one for switching between auto and manual focusing and the other for turning the image stabiliser on and off. The petal-shaped lens hood is easy to attach and provides excellent shielding against stray light. It reverses over the lens barrel when not in use.

Handling
The review lens was a comfortable fit on the NX10 body used for our tests and the combined camera-plus-lens felt light but well balanced. The front of the lens rotates a little as the lens is zoomed from the 18mm to the 55mm focal length position – but probably not enough to affect polarisers settings significantly.

The five focal length settings marked on the lens barrel appeared to be accurate in our shooting tests. Changes in maximum apertures as focal length is increased are shown in the table below.