Samsung opt for a more traditional shape with their revised ECX2, but does it improve in other areas?

The scars still show

Even without looking at the name, the styling of the camera this is based on, the Samsung ECX1 shows through – the hump in the middle is still there, as is the circular design on the front.

Also they still stuck with the enormous feature list – pretty much everything from the ECX1 returns, including the less-than-useful ones. The only things that are missing are a few focus modes and the exposure compensation.

My arms are tired

It’s a bit smaller and nicer to hold, but it is still a large camera. It looks kind of more camera-like so people pay less attention to it, except for when you extend that enormous zoom: that tends to get everyone’s attention.

I did try and use a few of the more unusual features, such as the time lapse, but the results weren’t particularly amazing. With a time lapse of an hour the shadows in the garden changed position a bit, but it wasn’t exactly wildlife-documentary standard, not least because I had the camera set up indoors and the sun started shining on the glass for most of the shots causing unwanted reflections and glare.

Checking the CCTV footage

Ilford P3 is an unsual film, designed originally for
surveillance systems: not so much traffic cameras, but in places like banks. For that it needs to have a few special properties, it needs to produce clear images with a bit of detail, work well indoors, be relatively inexpensive, quite thin and last a long time.

Most of those are desired properties in any film, it’s just being thin that’s not so good as it’s easy to damage in cameras and when developing it. You can see a few bits of damage on the pics above. The main reason for that is that I bought a 7.5m roll of the film and spooled it into canisters myself. I got a bit greedy and put more than 36 exposures-worth in which made it a bit too long for the developing tank, so it picked up a few creases when I was handling it.

Despite that I’m very pleased with how the pics came out. The film is pretty grainy, even for an ISO 400 film, but I like the effect and love the detail it gives. Using this camera with all its electronics felt a little bit sterile, but the film adds bags of character all on its own.

I’d take this camera in preference to the ECX1, but it’s not really a classic. This film would make any camera look good, and I have a lot of cameras I like better. The sometimes-wacky special features make it an interesting camera to have around for very specific needs – nothing else I have will do automatic time lapse photography – but it is unlikely I will ever want to do that again.