BobJ

18-300 is hardly the same as 70-300 . Because of the much greater range of the 18-300 I doubt very much that it would compare with the excellent image quality of the Fuji lens but surely the first decision is whether or not you need the 18-70 component .

Buy a secondhand 55-200. It5 an amazingly good lens.

When focus bracketing it is unlikely that you will be dealing with fast moving subjects or flickering lights. If you set the interval to 0 you run the risk of shutter shock taking the edge off the sharpness. So electronic shutter is the way to go in most circumstances.

I know exactly how much bit depth my camera has. If you actually read my last reply you will see that I quoted 14 bits for raw. When processing raw you can take full advantage of this input. The formats you are talking about are output formats that are produced either in the camera or by post processing software from the 12, or usually now, 14 bits from the A to D converter. As things stand at the moment jpeg xl seems to me to be the best bet for stills, although I could be wrong. We will have to wait and see. As I said, video may be a different matter.

I don't have an X-T4 but this might be a faulty battery. Worth a try.

I find that the viewfinder cup that is supplied with the X-T3 is not suitable for use with glasses as the eye relief is not sufficient. I use the older, smaller 'flat' version which works well and I can see the whole evf using it. I think it is called the EC-XT S.

I can't see a much need for anyone to send 1000 images. Possibly for an image library? The main point of the new format is that is a container. It can hold all sorts of files including, for example, audio and video. It has better compression but I doubt the image file size is smaller than jpeg because of the extra bit depth. It cannot give better detail but it will give better colour accuracy. There is no printer that I know of that can take advantage of more than 8 bits per channel though and although we specialists do have 10 bit monitors, for stills only Photoshop can take advantage so far. Lightroom, for example, is still 8 bit. Additionally there are no cameras at the moment, other than exotica like Phase One, that have more than 14 bits in the d to a convertor. So I think the new formats are of no real interest to a stills photographer at this time. Video may be a different story. JPEG XL may be more likely to become the new standard.

If I want to have the full colour and bit depth that my camera can record I use RAW. If I then want to preserve all of that I work with 16 bit TIFF. What would I want HEIF for?

I think that you are describing the normal noise from this lens and others. It's the gyros for the IOS, which run all the time irrespective of whether IOS is on or off. Also there may be some noise from the linear motors that do the focusing. I am not sure about the latter. The noise is normally very low so either you have sensitive hearing or perhaps there could be sometimes wrong but I doubt it.

Sorry, I have only just returned to look at the forum. I can't give you a video as I threw the cards away a long time ago. It is possible that what you all are experiencing is something different but in my case it was definitely a faulty sd card. Try with two different cards installed. You never know.

I have not experienced this with my new 70-300. In fact the auto focus is very quick and positive indeed. I don't know what the problem is but perhaps the lens is faulty.

In my experience this can be down to a faulty sd card. If you have two cards in, the faulty one will still cause the lock up as the camera cannot write to it. Replace both cards with good quality new ones and try again.

Not sure what went wrong for you. I have an X-T3 and do not have any real exposure problems. The XT-30 is smaller and lighter but the X-t3 is, as you say, weather resistent and has a much better viewfinder. I would say plump for the X-T3 if you can get one within your budget.

The firmware update may be coincidence. I had this experience with an x-t2. it was caused by a faulty SD card. Swopping them around will not work. The bad one will cause this fault in either slot. Replace both in the first instance and see what happens. I do hope that it is that simple for you too.

So Fuji released another firmware update on November 11th - 1.02. I haven't got the patience to repeat the exhaustive tests I did before but with some quick tests I believe that the issue has been resolved. The 16-80 now shows no more shutter induced softness than the 18-55 and this is such a small effect that it can only be seen by careful pixel peeping at 100%.

Thanks for bringing this to the attention of others. I recently bought the 16-80. I have done some tests with my X-T2 on the 18-55 and the 16-80 on and off a tripod and with ES and MS for each case, taking three images each time to try to eliminate other variables. I switched the OIS off when the 18-55 was on the tripod but did not switch it off (in the camera settings) for the 16-80. I set both lenses to 23mm and used iso to vary the exposure. The results (dozens of images - took ages) showed that the 18-55 was affected. Some shots were slightly sharper with the electronic shutter. This applied on or off the tripod. The 16-80 was affected more than the 18-55. It does seem to be more sensitive around 1/100 to 1/200th. I didn't expect this result but it explains the somewhat variable results I have been getting. This means that if it is shutter shock then at slow shutter settings, where the vibrations have died down for most of the exposure, and high speeds which are presumably too fast to record the after shocks, the effect will be negligable. So it looks like it could be the shutter. The 16-80 seems to be affected more than the 18-55. I don't yet know if switching the OIS off in camera with the 16-80 helps. it's worth noting that the effect is small. You can see it plainly at 100% magnification on a 100ppi monitor but this would equate to a five foot wide print at that resolution. Still, it is disturbing. Fortunately for most of my photography I can use the electronic shutter. Sony had this trouble with the original A7 and A7R.

A good copy of this lens should be very sharp, but I have seen a bad copy. A friend bought an x-t2 together with an 18-55mm. Compared to my copy it was awful! So Fuji do make the odd bad lens. However the results didn't look quite like yours. I suspect you do have a bad copy but before you jump to conclusions you might like to do some better controlled tests. Remove any filter that you have attached. Poor quality filters can give this kind of effect. Take the camera outside as obviously you don,t want to shoot through glass. Select a distant view so that depth of field doesn't matter too much. Switch off the OIS on the lens and mount the camera on a tripod. Do not extend the centre column. Take test shots using the two second self timer to avoid shaking the camera. Take one at max aperture and one at f5.6 at 18mm and 55mm. It's possible that the OIS is responsible in which case you will have to switch it on and try some hand held shots. Good luck

I rarely use video but a couple of days ago I wanted some of the grandchildren. To my surprise after about 10 seconds the video would stop with a write error. this was at 25fps HD. I tried all sorts including different cards. Eventually on a whim I changed the full Hd movie output from SD FHD HDMI FHD to SD-HDMI FHD, tried to take a video, which of course didn't work, then changed the setting back to SD FHD HDMI FHD. Voila! I don't know what that was about but It's been ok since. I hope that this may help someone else. I guess cameras nowadays are not really cameras. They are computers with a camera function.

I handled an X-H1 for a few minutes at the Photo Show on Monday. The thing about it that immediately impressed me was the viewfinder. It's seriously good. I can't afford one though - oh well.

Wow it's a minefield isn't it? I really can't add anything other than to agree that the main benefit of carbon fibre is said to be vibration damping. A tripod forms a torsion spring (try twisting the head of extended tripods, it's a good way to compare their stability) attached to a mass - the camera. As such it will ring at its resonant frequency when something disturbs it. A lossy material like wood or carbon fibre will damp the oscillations better. Having said that everyone got on just fine with aluminium before carbon fibre came along. So I think it's probably a bit academic and the carbon pods are not usually much lighter than the aluminium ones.

Hi Kimballistic. With respect I don't think that you have quite understood my point, which maybe I made poorly. I agree that "very bad" or "excellent" are scientifically meaningless. However exact measurements of lens performance are not really relevant since in the scenario you mention the lens would only be the limiting factor if it had an MTF that was huge compared to the sensor's, so that the product of the two was mostly determined by the lens. This is never likely to happen in practice. My point is that the system resolution is always a product of the lens and sensor resolutions so a higher resolution sensor will always improve the system resolution with any lens. It is highly unlikely that one or the other could be a limiting factor. Diffraction is bit of a minefield but you are right. As the pixel pitch becomes smaller so diffraction starts to occur earlier, but the system will also also have greater resolution. in other words, if you were content with the same resolution as the wider pitch sensor gave then the limit would be much the same. And of course smaller sensors need shorter focal length lenses for the same angle of view but the result is better depth of field, so that f11 is about the smallest aperture we can use before diffraction starts to become a factor but a full frame camera has to be stopped down to f16, its diffraction limit, (roughly) to get the same dof. At the moment, as far as I am aware, apsc sensors with pixel counts larger than 24mp are not available. I personally don't believe that they have reached some kind of limit though. It looked like full frame had "topped out" at 12mp, then it went to 24, 36 and now 50. I would guess that full frame will go to around 80mp within the next couple of years.Sony is almost the only game in town now. The latest tech is never released straight away though. Sony will need to recover their development and tooling costs and a profit from the existing silicon first. It may be that Fujifilm are aware of a new sensor and working on a model to incorporate it. In the meantime they have to defend their present situation, much as they did with their statement about IBIS being impossible, while they developed it and no doubt agreed to patent payments. That's just my opinion of course.

Sorry, but this sounds like bull****. The fact is that the sytem resolution is a product of the lens resolution and the sensor resolution and neither is limited by the other. The system MTF is the product of the sensor MTF, the lens MTF and the MTF of any other component such as an anti-aliasing filter (not present in Fuji cameras). Obviously if a lens was very bad then that product would remain low with an increase in sensor resolution. However the Fuji lenses are mostly excellent so I doubt that they could limit the system that much. Professor Bob Newman explained the physics very clearly in article in Amateur Photographer March 10th 2012. They said that it wasn't possible to put IBIS into the bodies because the lenses would not allow it. That was clearly was not true either.

I have just acquired a 56mm. At f1.2 the centre is very sharp but the extreme edges are fairly soft. By f2.8 the edges even up. The lens is essentially a portrait lens and I did expect that sort of behavior from it, which is common in such lenses. Also the test was made with a flat target. Many lenses have field curvature which means that a flat target test will be misleading. However it should be sharp in the centre.

In the case of one edge being worse than the others, this could well be a lens collimation fault where one or more elements are badly aligned in your particular example. I have suffered this myself, although it wasn't a Fuji lens. Despite many people swearing by their 35mm f1.4, the copy I have anyway is definitely not one of Fujis best designs for sharpness. But sharpness is only one aspect of a lens. There is a huge price difference between Leica and Fuji lenses. The Fuji lenses are excellent for the price but you cannot expect them to compete with what are essentially hand made, money no object lenses. You can get an adapter to use Leica lenses. No autofocus possible though of course.

Well the 10-24 is a lot more useful than a 16 for the obvious reason that it covers more focal lengths! Only you will know whether your personal style will benefit but I find that a lot of my work makes use of around 20 to 24mm and the longer focal lengths of the 55-200 with occasional use of wider down to 10. I believe that the 10-24 is considerably larger and heavier than the 16 though.