BobJ

Have you tried a different card?

Someone said that Fuji is the most innovative company. Despite being totally wedded to Fuji I really can't agree. Sony is the only company that has produced any real innovation in the past decade.

I am sorry, I should have added that my last comments apply to "normal" exposure lengths and I use an X-t2. Oh and by the way, counter intuitively, a small amount of luminance noise will usually improve the image. This doesn't apply to the "snow" that you are experiencing of course.

+1 to the possible card problem. Try replacing both cards.

Well I make prints for exhibitions that are about 50cm on the long edge max, occasionally from a heavy crop. My previous camera was a Sony Alpha 99. I don't find the X-t2 files any noisier than the A99 ones, in fact they are better. I use raw normally. I don't use any noise reduction at all at 200 iso, maybe a touch at 400. At 800 some nr becomes more necessary and at 1600 is essential. I hope this helps a bit.

If you have to zoom in to 100% to see the noise then there is no problem. The average monitor is about 100 pixels per inch so at 100% you are looking at an image that is five feet wide! Pixel peeping is bad for your health.

Rockwell is not a pro so who cares what he says?

Rockwell is not a pro so who cares what he says?

I have never tried an exposure as long as that, so maybe I shouldn't be commenting, but there are probably two things at play here. Firstly they are both seriously underexposed. If you have to brighten the raw by 2.5 stops then what you have done is to take the image at 1200 iso, not 200 iso. Secondly, with such a long exposure heat becomes a problem leading to "hot" pixels. That is what the long exposure noise reduction deals with. With very long exposures it becomes tedious to use long exposure nr but it is possible to take an image with the lens cap on and subtract it in Photoshop.

This Mac v PC thing is the same as Canon v Nikon. It really is pointless. You just have to decide which wil suitvyou better - which isn't easy I know.

A definitive answer to how many cores Photoshop utilises seems to be elusive but I think that four is about the maximum except for liquify and a few of the filters and 3D rendering. I don't know about Lightroom. In any case more cores usually means a slower clock speed.

Windows 10 is stable now. In its early days Microsoft was using its customers as beta testers. It was appaling. The only problem with Windows is it is much more vulnerable to malware. That is nothing to do with any inherent weakness. The crooks generally don't bother with the Mac side of things because they are relatively few of them. I use Windows but have to concede that if you want a quiet life a Mac might be the way to go.

P.S. I forgot to mention - leave room in your budget for a good monitor. That is more important than a little extra speed.

It depends on your budget of course. I am a retired computer engineer and I find it a minefield. Fit 16GB of ram if you can but don't go below 8. The graphics card is not very important for Photoshop and Lightroom as they do not work it very hard at all. However, if you are going to process video then the graphics card is important. Make sure it has at least least 2GB of memory for stills though. The C drive should be an SSD and be sure it is big enough to double as the lightroom catalogue and Photoshop scratch (unlike with hard drives these can be on the same SSD as the OS without much of a performance hit). So 256GB or larger. You can use a separate hard drive for your files. If you have the money go for the fastest processor. The best value for money though will be a model one or two levels below that spec. I am not up to speed with the latest processors so I can't be specific.

I haven't got my grip to hand at the moment. I am away from home. I think that there is a control lock around the shutter button.

I think that you have to have a pretty extreme set of circumstances. My camera was soaked on one day and frozen the second. Such is the weather in the far north of Scotland in winter. I agree though that it's a little worrying.

If you have Lightroom it can be set to not import duplicates. This works well. I have never known it to make a mistake. So each time you put the card in the reader you will not have to manually select the new images.

SD cards are solid state flash storage and cannot become fragmented in the same way that a hard drive does. I have read many times that they should be formatted rather than delete the files but I cannot think of any reason why this should be so. I suspect that it is a myth. However it's quicker to format if you want to delete the lot. If you do format, always format in the camera as it will create the required file structure.

It's pointless to compare converters using their default settings. Lightroom has its defaults set to give a flat and lightly sharpened look. You have to use those sliders and then save the result as a preset. Capture 1 is made to give a more finished look by default. You can make the lightroom result look almost identical to the Capture 1 if you want. Lightroom can be slow though. Adobe have admitted that it is a problem and say they are going to make it a priority in future update.

It sounds like you have been very ingenious in what you have done. I doubt that there would be any official way to do it. I wonder if the grip, which gives you a total of three batteries, would do the job. Expensive but not invasive.

I experienced viewfinder fogging in my X-T2. I had been in very wet conditions the previous day and then very cold conditions. It cleared ok once I got the camera back inside. However I had lost the eyepiece earlier in the week and this may be a part of the sealing. You have to remember that "weather sealed" does not mean waterproof. In fact it's a pretty meaningles statement. This is the same with other makes though. I don't know of any current interchangeable lens camera that is waterproof. So the message is that you still have to be a little careful.

I have had a problem with somewhat similar symptoms. The camera would not complete a write and the red light would stay on continuously. It was due to a faulty sd card. Try replacing both cards with different ones.

I would love to have a definitive answer to this question from Fuji. Some other makes have a panning setting for their image stabilisation. Unfortunately, because it is in the nature of panning to get some blurred shots, it is very difficult to test. I would think that it should be easy to discriminate between low frequency panning motion and the higher frequencies of camera shake and build that into the system. But is it and do they?

Maybe I am getting deaf in my old age but I can't believe you are serious about the noise. Yes, you can hear it because the camera is next to your ear, but why is it such a problem?

It's not a stupid question Pranfeuri. In a nutshell then, here goes. Dynamic range is a term used in electronics. In a camera it is used to describe the brightness range from the deepest shadow tone that can be distinguished from noise to the brightest tone that can be recorded before the sensels become saturated and cannot convert any more photons. In ye olden days when I used film the equivalent was known as the films latitude. An analogue to digital converter is used in the camera to digitise the output from the sensor and can usually give a 14 bit wide digital output. Jpegs are only 8 bit so they cannot include all those tones. However 8 bits are enough to describe all the tones that a monitor, tablet etc can display or a that print can reproduce. Therefore we have the opportunity to compress the 14 bits into 8 bits using what is known as the tone curve. The algorithm in the camera does this for us but may need altering for some images. The DR and shadow and highlight settings in the Fuji cameras can be used to do this. Basically the DR settings underexpose so as not to blow the highlights and boost the mid and shadow tones to fit in. The shadow and highlight adjustments change the tone curve to make them darker or lighter as required. Of course if you use raw then you can decide afterwards how to fit the tones in. That is one of the main advantages of raw. With the latest sensors it's amazing how much detail can be rescued from the shadows before noise becomes a real issue.