Samsung EX2F review:
Even if you take your photography seriously, it's not always practical to carry around a big DSLR, no matter how much you like having access to full manual controls and shooting in raw file formats.
If you need something a little more portable, the Samsung EX2F is one of a handful of short-throw zoom compacts that should appeal. It has plenty of hardware controls, a flip-out screen, and produces great results. .
The Samsung EX2F can be had for around £350 online.
Professional quality
It's a professional compact in every sense of the word. The standard mode dial is complemented by a second dial that manages shooting speed, with options for single frame, low, medium and high burst speed, bracketing and 2 and 10 second timers.
These three burst mode options translate to 10, 5, and 3 frames per second, each at full resolution. They're complemented by an intelligent pre-capture mode that grabs 10 frames in the time it takes you to go from half-press to full-press the shutter button. When using this mode, you can slightly anticipate the action you want to capture and still have a very good chance of capturing it successfully.
The EX2F's fastest burst setting captures 10 frames per second.
Exposure
In regular use, shutter speeds range from 1/8 to 1/2,000 second in intelligent auto mode, but you can push the longest exposure up to a full 30 seconds in manual mode.
This, as well as the aperture in Aperture Priority mode, is set using a small dial inserted into the grip. Pressing this toggles between the main mode setting - shutter, aperture, etc. - and exposure compensation. Compensation only gives you two stops in either direction in 1/3 stop increments, but it's complemented by an excellent built-in neutral density filter to improve the balance of your shots of sight.
This is a physical filter, not a digital workaround, and you can hear it click into place when you activate it.
Using the Neutral Density filter improved the balance of this photo and helped preserve a lot of detail in the overcast sky (click image to enlarge).
Sensitivity ranges from ISO 80 to ISO 3,200 in regular use, and can be pushed to ISO 12,800 with the ISO extender.
Low-light performance is good. Increasing the sensitivity naturally introduces noise into the results, but even at settings as high as ISO 1600 it's well controlled and looks like you'd expect from some rivals at the half of this sensitivity.
Although increasing the sensitivity does result in increased image noise, it's well controlled and not so pronounced that it spoils the shot unless you're zooming in directly. This image was taken with a sensitivity of ISO 1600 (click on the image to enlarge it).
The lens itself is extremely versatile due to its bright f/1.4 maximum aperture. Even at full telephoto, equivalent to 80mm on a regular 35mm camera (it's a moderate 24mm at the other end scale), it sits at f/2.7, which many competing compacts struggle to achieve at wide angle.
This means it's easy to take very short shots, with the subject clearly removed from its surroundings to catch the eye.
This temperature gauge has been rotated to f/2 and is neatly pulled forward of the car body, which has been slightly defocused (click image to enlarge).
Minimum focusing distance is 40cm at wide angle and 100cm at telephoto, although wide-angle macro shots can be recorded with the lens 1cm from the subject.
Color and detail
The colors are reproduced very faithfully in all lighting conditions. I carried out my tests under a mostly cloudy sky, with an adapted white balance, and the results were striking and very satisfactory.
The nose of this plane, below, is shiny and the colors are rich in the paint and the reflection on the propeller. The sky, which could easily have been rendered a faint gray in comparison, has a lot of texture in its different levels of luminance.
Despite shooting under overcast skies, the EX2F did a great job of maintaining punchy, lifelike colors in my test results (click image to enlarge).
The EX2F has a 12-megapixel back-illuminated sensor, which produces 4000 x 3000 pixel images. a moderate crop, but not particularly tight.
However, the digital zoom, which saves the 3.3x physical range of the lens, is quite good. Used with care, its cropping and enhancement of the central part of the image does not degrade the result too much.