kimcarsons

RAFs have 14-bits of dynamic range, JPEGs 8-bits. Part of the art of processing raw files is in determining how to squeeze that 14-bits down to 8. It looks like you had some 'highlight recovery' going on there too, in which the raw development software tries to fill in blown out regions with the color of the surroundings (resulting in large, detail-less patches of color). Flowers are tough for subjects with digital for multiple reasons, but one is that it's easy to blow out e.g. the red channel while there's still plenty of headroom in the blue and green channels. Recovery here looks bad too, but not as bad as when all three channels are blown. Take home lesson: a properly exposed flower shot should look under-exposed before processing (and probably after too, if you want to maintain any detail in the petals). Bear in mind that display calibration entails calibrating the brightness and gamma also. The ideal brightness is a matter of opinion, but 110-120 nits is a common value. Any decent colorimeter should be able to do this. BUT this also entails having a standard level of ambient illumination. So if your workstation is in a room with variable lighting (i.e. daylight), all bets are off (unless you have one of the fancy colorimeters that stays plugged in all the time to measure ambient illum. and compensate--even then there are compromises). As always, the histogram and your software's over/under exposure warning indicators are more objective guides than your own perception.

@merlin, you need to try that calibration again, buddy. Just looking at the histograms should show you that most of these images are over exposed.

Well, there certainly could be something up with your phone, but the fact is that Apple's screens are the best out there in terms of being roughly calibrated to sRGB out of the box, so if your monitor isn't an Apple one, then I'd suspect that it's just a case of the two lower quality displays matching (the fuji and your montior) and the iPhone display being the more accurate one. Note that white-point (warm or cool) is not strictly part of the sRGB calibration here. It's possible for two displays to have different white balances and yet still be accurate representations of sRGB. (Similar to looking at the same print in daylight and tungsten... the colors will be perceived the same [barring metamerism], if you only look at one screen at a time and allow your eyes to adjust/match the ambient illuminant.) If you *really* want to know what's what, you have to calibrate your monitor with a colorimeter/spectrometer and if you *reallyreally* want to match colors you need to profile your camera (a much more involved procedure). And your printer too if you print. If/when you do this, the first thing that will be very obvious is that the displays on the Fuji cameras are not calibrated. Nor do they have a method of calibration (some other brands actually allow you to use a colorimeter to calibrate the camera's display). Yes, this does put a damper on the whole WYSIWYG EVF thing. My advice is to use what limited controls the camera provides to tweak its display so that it matches your phone as closely as possible. You might want to do this with the Show Pic Effect setting off, so that you're not confusing matters of display settings (which affect only the display) with film simulation settings (which affect the recorded JPEGs).

Well, for one thing, the screen on your iPhone is much higher quality than the LCD on the camera. The screen on the iPhone is also pretty well-calibrated to sRGB by Apple. The screens on FujiFilm cameras, AFAICT, are not calibrated at all. Not even the LCD to the EVF. However, you can tweak the the settings a little bit... Brightness and saturation only. I find turning the saturation and brightness down on the camera displays helps get a more accurate impression of what the image will look like on a calibrated display... But it's an impression only. As to the 'overexposed' part, you probably have the brightness on your screen turned up much too high (if you left it at the defaults or on auto brightness). Most modern smartphones have blindly bright backlights designed to make them usable in broad daylight.

I'd rather have had some bug fixes than the addition of more half-baked features...

The on-sensor phase detect technology is horizontal-only (only sensitive to vertical lines). There are no vertical, cross ,or X type points as there are on DSLRs.

Facts, experiences, and opinions with which you disagree do not constitute trolling. Nothing is perfect. If you want to throw a sarcastic tantrum every time someone points out some imperfection in Fuji equipment (or any other brand), you're going to spend an awful lot of time posting "Bugger. The camera is unusable. I will sell mine!" (which I see you already do). Why should everyone walk eggshells and tiptoe around the truth just because OleDK might get triggered?

Definitely not normal. If I were you I'd return/exchange it with the retailer before your window expires with them, rather than deal with Fuji.

If you don't like trolling language, then why do you use it yourself?

It's so subjective though. You really can't assume the defaults are correct. There's absolutely no reason to believe lightroom's sharpening is in any way ideal for either camera. A better approach would be to tune the sharpening to match visually. Even if you end up with both images oversharpened, it should be possible to tell which is cleaner. One will look (really) sharp, and one will look like it has wet mascara.

Are you 100% certain that lightroom isn't also responsible for the softness of the X-A2 output? Anyway, when doing comparisons like this its best to change one variable at a time. Different sensor pattern, different resolution, different software--it's just too many variables.

Yeah, they never mention everything they fix (or break!) in the descriptions though. Basically, unless the camera and lens are running the latest firmware, all bets are off as far as them actually being compatible with each other (which incompatibility could potentially cause a problem like the one you experienced). All evidence points to Fuji doing very little testing/QA on their firmware releases, they're certainly not going to be testing the latest camera firmware against older lens firmware versions. Let us know if you can still reproduce the problem with the new FW...

It also recently had a firmware update to fix OIS oscillation (even with OIS switch in the off position). Are you running the latest firmware on it?

What lens were you using anyway?

The number you can shoot depends on the buffer more than the card. It's the time it takes the camera to dump the buffer to the card that varies with card or interface speed. You need to time it with a stop watch. The speed of playback is more apparent, as you can flip through pictures with the wheel or joystick and plainly see that playback from slot 2 is slower than playback from slot 1 with the same card. (indicating that both read and write speeds are lower with slot 2) The EVF switching issue requires a specific set of circumstances see: http://www.fuji-x-forum.com/topic/4288-slow-eye-sensor-evf-switching-response-with-uhs-i-cards/