Samsung EX2F review

When we’re contemplating paying a lot of money for a premium product, we don’t want to be forced to make compromises. With that in mind, the EX2F looks promising. Its oversized 1/1.7in sensor distinguishes from cheaper cameras, and its f/1.4 lens is as bright as you’ll find on a compact camera. There’s comprehensive manual control, 10fps continuous shooting, a hotshoe for an external flashgun, a 3in fully articulated screen and integrated Wi-Fi. No other compact camera can match this line-up of features.

The models that come close are a capable bunch, though, including the Fujifilm X10 with its sumptuous image quality and the Panasonic LX7, our current favourite premium compact camera for all-round appeal.

While the EX2F compares well on paper, there’s a lack of attention to detail that makes it less rewarding to use. It should be well suited to photographic tinkerers with its front command dial, rear wheel, AE Lock button and drive mode dial. However, there are no dedicated buttons for exposure compensation, ISO speed or white balance. These are available via a Fn button, but navigating the 15 options that reside here isn’t as fast as using single-function buttons, especially since the Fn menu doesn’t respond while photos are being saved.

The rear wheel is used to navigate across these 15 options while the front dial adjusts the selected setting. However, it doesn’t register quick spins of the dial properly, only adjusting the setting by a small amount, so large changes are annoyingly slow to make. For example, going from a 30-second to a 1/4,000-second shutter speed took 32 spins of the dial. The same dial is assigned to shutter speed duties by default in shutter-priority and manual modes, and performing the same task here took just four spins.

Shot-to-shot performance was pretty quick at 1.1 seconds for JPEGs, but raw mode was slower and quite erratic, averaging 2.4 seconds. The 10fps continuous mode lasted for 10 frames – a fairly typical achievement for this class of camera – but the slower 5.5fps and 3fps modes are also limited to 10 frames. All three modes took nine seconds to recover before being ready to shoot again, and they all showed a blank screen during capture. Continuous and raw modes can’t be used together.

Other niggling issues include the lack of an orientation sensor, so portrait-shaped photos must be rotated manually. The 240-shot battery life might not last a day’s use, and in-camera charging means you can’t charge one battery while using another.

Another concern is that automatic exposure settings were poorly chosen in low light. Smart Mode (Samsung’s name for auto mode) restricted the ISO speed to 800 and the shutter speed to 1/8s, which resulted in under-exposed shots in very low light. Program and priority modes refused to budge beyond ISO 400 and used shutter speeds up to 1 second, resulting in blurry shots in low light. The 1/1.7in sensor is capable of decent results up to ISO 1600, but it shouldn’t be up to the user to have to set it manually.

Crisp, smooth details and balanced skin tones – we’ve no complaints about this shot

Then again, the bright f/1.4 lens means that manual intervention isn’t usually necessary in typical household lighting, as long as subjects are reasonably static. It’s a sharp lens, too, giving crisp details into the corners of frames. Image quality was excellent up to ISO 400, although it struggled a little with complex, fine textures.

The lens is sharp but handling of these dense textures is good rather than great

Faster ISO speeds took their toll on details. It’s common for noise reduction to smear fine details, but photos also exhibited a strange pixelated quality on close inspection. Processing raw files in Lightroom gave much better results, but given the performance penalty of shooting raw, we’d be hesitant to use it routinely.

Zooming in in overcast weather has pushed the ISO speed to 400, but details are still crisp, with little evidence of noise reduction

By ISO 1600, fine details have all but disappeared. Also note the pixelated edges around the white areas

1080p videos exhibited sharp details and flattering colours, but the zoom was clearly audible on the soundtrack and low-light clips fizzed with image noise. There’s no manual exposure control for videos, and slow-motion clips are limited to VGA resolution. It’s fine for casual clips but not for demanding use.

Samsung was the first manufacturer to bring sophisticated Wi-Fi functions to digital cameras. Other manufacturers are catching up, but the Canon S110 (review coming soon) is the only other camera in this class to include Wi-Fi. The Samsung comes top for breadth of features, with an app for iOS and Android for browsing and transferring photos, and another that provides a remote viewfinder and shutter release. It can also control the zoom, flash, self-timer and resolution settings, and transfer the last photo to the smartphone or tablet. It’s great for group self-portraits, but the limited control is a little frustrating. The camera’s controls are locked while the app is running, and zooming from the app involved lots of small shunts.

Here’s the remote control app in use

Wi-Fi options continue with the ability to connect to a home network and share photos and videos via email, Facebook, YouTube, Picasa and Photo Bucket. It can upload to Microsoft SkyDrive, back up to a local PC and act as a DLNA server, streaming photos and videos to a smart TV. As usual for the new crop of Wi-Fi-enabled cameras, a couple of features didn’t work properly in our tests. In this case it was the PC backup utility and the Remote Viewfinder app for Android.

Viewed in isolation, it’s easy to find lots to praise about this camera. However, with the fantastic Panasonic LX7 lingering in our memory, it was the EX2F’s flaws that were more striking. The LX7 doesn’t have Wi-Fi or an articulated screen, but we’d gladly trade them for its even better image quality, longer zoom, friendlier controls, faster performance and more capable video mode. If Wi-Fi is an essential feature, we’d recommend the Canon S110. Its lens isn’t nearly as bright but its controls are a lot less frustrating.