Samsung EX2F review

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Verdict:

The superb lens tops the impressive list of features, but numerous niggles hold it back

Review Date: 21 Dec 2012

Price when reviewed: £380

Supplier: http://www.johnlewis.com

Reviewed By: Ben Pitt

Our Rating 3 stars out of 5

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.

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