aceflibble

Fuji won't publicly acknowledge rumour/gossip sites like this, and they're loathe to acknowledge other unofficial Fuji sites. They know they exist—they even read them themselves—but they will not publicly acknowledge them. No chance they'd have any interest in using the member base of any such website for marketing.

You misunderstand. DR400 isn't doing anything magical to the higlight range, it's just under-exposing your picture more, and pushing the shadows more. If you're try to use DR100 and push the shadows without having underexposed, then yeah, you're going to end up with blown highlights, still. In other words, DR100 at ISO 200, 1/200th and f/4 gives you the same highlight detail as DR400 at ISO 800, 1/800, f/4. That DR100 file would then need to have the dark tones pushed by +2 stops (in theory; more like +1 2/3rd stops in practice) to match the DR400 file. The X-Trans and X-Trans II sensors are what we call 'ISOless'. Basically, an ISO 200 (actually 140, remember) photo given a flat exposure push of +1 stop looks the same as a photo which was taken with ISO set to 400. This holds true up to ISO 1600. So basically, if you think you need to take a photo at any ISO between 200 and 1600, you may as well always just take the photo at ISO 200, and then push as needed later. You can test this out for yourself with the cameras' own raw processing options. ISO higher than 1600 does actually work out better to do natively, but that's more to do with the poor quality of Fuji raw convertors, rather than an actual limitation of the sensor. ISO 100 is totally pointless as it's entirely digital and only means you lose highlight dynamic range, which is why it's only an option for in-camera jpg and not raw. Again, this all stems from the 'ISOless' sensor and Fuji fudging the ISO numbers. All that is to say, again, that if the OP is looking for the flattest image to grade later, it's best to stick to DR100 and then push shadow detail as much as you see fit later, when grading. To match what the other DR options give you, you simply underexpose, which has no drawbacks because you're not losing any detail unless you underexpose by more than 3 stops. You get the choice, after filming is done, on how much you want to push the file back up. If you do use DR200 or 400, you're locking your video into a certain level of shadow pushing which you can't undo. tl;dr: Yes, DR400 will look flatter and retain more highlight detail if you don't know how it works and you're comparing it to a DR100 file which hasn't been underexposed properly. But for video grading, you never want those kind of baked-in decisions.

It's not even a question of "best candidate"; if you want interchangeable lenses and an OVF, the X-Pro1 is your only choice in the Fuji line, without jumping up to the Pro2 for obviously a lot more money.

Can't speak for 5.6 specifically, but whatever the latest version is—just subscribe to CC, it's easier and dirt cheap for LR + PS combined in the photography package—works absolutely fine. By that I mean, no better or worse than any other software I've used for Fuji files. I did a thread a while back showcasing the (lack of) difference between raw files processed in Lightroom version-whatever-it-was-at-the-time and the in-camera .jpgs. Every now and then I notice one small band of colour may not be 100% right, but then, when I try other software, they're also screwing things up, just in different ways. My general experience is LR is the best for colour bu the sharpening and noise reduction isn't well optimised for Fuji, Iridient does high frequency detail better but the colour profile is never as close as LR's, and every other program is somewhere between those two. Basically, no program is perfect. It just hasn't been worth the investment yet for any company to really develop for Fuji files the way they do for other manufacturers'. Whichever program you use—or even if you opt for the in-camera processing—you're going to be making some kind of compromise, be it colour accuracy, high frequency detail, noise reduction, or whatever else. I've ended up sticking with Lightroom because, although it's far from perfect and needs to be improved in many areas, it's still the best for file organisation, so I'd always be using it anyway. Why open each file in Lightroom, Photoshop, and a third program, when just Lightroom and Photoshop will do?

Huh, yeah, it wasn't one of those, it didn't have that notch IIRC. So I guess that means it's actually USB 2.0? I don't work with mini/micro versions enough to know which is available with what. (Ditto for the HDMI and audio in/outs.) But that'd make more sense given how little Fuji care about tethering, and there aren't many other uses for a USB. Ah well. Bit of a shame.

Tell that to the dude on the FR front page the other week who got one photo with his X-T1 in regular city rain before the camera totally bricked Seriously, though. I've got gear made in the 50s which does still work, and it's not been treated well. I've also had super-tough cameras like a Canon 1D X break down after one unlucky bump or twenty minutes shooting in too-hot direct sun. You can't tell when these things are going to happen. So I'll reiterate what I said before: if this is a hobby for you, you might be okay risking taking a Fuji to some extreme conditions. If this is your profession and you have to get that shot—no excuses and no chance to reshoot—then don't invite any more risk than you need to, and don't use Fuji.

"Stealth" street shooting just makes me think of all the comic and video game conventions I used to go to where they had to start putting up specific notices warning people to not try to sneakily take photos up girls' skirts. Don't be That Guy.

Depends what how you define the "look", what you're shooting, and whether you shoot raw or jpg. For jpg, the newer files are sharper. Noise reduction is less aggressive by default and can be turned lower than before. For high frequency detail, like grass, leaves, or a fabric texture, you'll find the new files are less smeared. Shadow detail is very slightly cleaner. Skin tones aren't so heavily optimised just for Asian tones now, so if you shoot portraits and your clients/subjects cover a wide range of skin tones from all ethnicities, the new files will be more flattering overall. Red and intense orange tones hold detail and are smoother, now, with less chance of a bright red object burning or blocking out. If you shoot black & white you'll probably appreciate the built-in S-shape tone curve of the Acros profile, as it nicely increases contrast and sharpness without crushing/burning detail or increasing blocking like the normal shadow/highlight and sharpness controls do. The red, yellow, and green filters for the monochrome and Acros profiles are also very slightly less severe than they are on the older cameras, so they look a bit more like what you get with an actual colour filter and not the overly-photoshopped nature of the old files. For raw, it's basically the same as you had before. A few things are better, like intense red tones not getting crushed as badly, and of course the resolution is higher so you naturally get more detail, but that's about it. This is of course better if you're shooting technical stuff. Panels, product packaging, macro, etc. It's nicer if you shoot landscapes, just like any higher-resolution, lower-noise sensor always is. If you shoot portraits, street, events, or travel, and you shoot raw, I don't think you'll notice any difference at all. The in-camera jpgs have changed in a small but noticable way, which not everybody is going to like. (Just like how some people still prefer the look of X-Trans I files to X-Trans II.) The raw files... they're raw files. The changes are minimal and you could correct them back to how the X-Trans II files looked, if you really want. I say this as someone who most commonly uses the T1 & T10 and has rented a Pro2. People who have lived/worked with the Pro2 more intensely may have spotted further changes, but I mean, I put about 500 shots on the thing, so I feel I've got a good grasp on what the new sensor will do.

Yeah, sounds about like what I experienced. Got the X100S and after that thought right, to hell with it, going to make the switch. Only I have no love for the EVF—I liked it at first, but I've come to find the rear screen is simply better for me in every single circumstance—and I have ended up not selling all of my previous gear, 'cause tethering with Fuji still doesn't work anywhere near as well as I'd like it, and for some work the colour and high frequency details needs to be more accurate than Fuji allows. As far as tethering with the Pro2 and T2 goes, indeed there is no plan for the Pro2 to ever get tethering. Perhaps after the T2 gets it they'll fit it back into the Pro2, but right now, that's not the plan. The T2 should have tethered support like the T1, i.e. technically it will work but it still won't be as good as it can be with something like Canon, Nikon, Sony, Mamiya, etc. You're right in your assumption that tethering simply isn't a priority for Fuji. The fact of the matter is that Fuji's priority market is Japan and a few other parts of Asia, where their products sell well as 'lifestyle' cameras. They're a fashion statement and something people buy to upgrade their 'selfies'. They're not being used in studios over there. Also, tethering isn't used much in studios there, either. Yes, you can point to a few examples of Japanese pros using tethering, but it's not the standard practice and it's far from a significant enough proportion of users for Fuji to sink time & money into developing further. So you've got a system not made for studio, for a market which doesn't use tethering much... no wonder Fuji don't really care to sort it out. Other brands like Canon, Nikon, and Sony, support tethering more because they generally either have a better and longer history of making digital cameras for regions outside of Asia, or in the case of Sony, because they're a wider, more global company and they stopped prioritising Japan a long time ago, for all their products. Fuji don't have that kind of history with digital cameras and the rest of the world. They still adhere to what Japan wants, primarily. See also: poor video support, colour reproduction optimised for Asian skin tones, inability to fully turn off noise reduction, etc.

Read the sentence directly after the one you quoted

I use it for all of my studio product and formal portrait work. My typical studio set up is a Canon 1Ds mkIII or a Mamiya/Leaf Credo 50 tethered into Capture One. I know the software very well. With those systems, it works great. I would never dream of using the Mamiya any other day. With Fuji, I've given it a try with the Pro1, T1, and T10, and it's sucked with all of them. Nothing about it works better than Lightroom and several things work worse than Lightroom/don't work at all; and like I said, it's not like I hold Lightroom in high regard, either. I don't yet own a Pro2 (and doubt I ever will as I'm planning on buying a couple of T2s), but given how little the program supports the X-Trans III files, I'm not counting on Capture One becoming my go-to for those new cameras, either.

If you want softer tons than the Pro Neg H, obviously Pro Neg S is your choice, just like Pro 400H and 160NS. You could also try using the Astia/soft colour profile, with the saturation and shadow controls reduced. The colour hues on that are a little closer to 400H—once you've desaturated it a bit—but it's still not exact. Just another variation of the same. None of the film simulations (or just colour profiles, as every other manufacturer calls them) promise the same results as the film stock. That's why they generally describe the film simulations with less-specific names. If you want to replicate a film look exactly, you have to remember that whatever film you're used to—in this case, 400H, but this applies for any other film stock, too—isn't just a linear hue and saturation grading like with digital. Hues and saturation vary wildly with exposure, temperature, how it's been stored, age, and of course, how you develop it. So if you have or had one specific film look, you need to think about how you arrived at that look, then reverse-engineer it in your head to work out how you adjust the raw files to get the same results. Did you develop your film in such a way as it added saturation? Did you use it in any way which may have causes a hue shift? Did you routinely give it more exposure than you do with your digital files? (That one's very common.) Think about all these things, shoot raw, and adjust the raw files accordingly.

Low budget: X100 Otherwise: X100S or X-Pro1 + whichever prime lens of your choice. Exact prices depend on condition, rarity in your area, etc. Frankly, though, once you get used to a good EVF, you'll never touch the OVF portion again. And hell, try using just the rear screen for a week; you'll never go back to using a viewfinder at all. My journey with Fuji literally went: "this [optical] viewfinder is real nice!", "this EVF is even nicer!", "the screen is nicer again!", and finally "this tilt screen changes everything!"

Honestly, with Fuji, forget Capture One. It's a great program with Leaf/Mamiya products. It's great with Sony. It's pretty good with Nikon and Canon, as far as tethering goes, but it's no better for their raw files than any other program. For Fuji it's downright atrocious. Shaky raw support. No tether support. The standard controls aren't well suited to non-bayer files. There's honestly, honestly no reason to use Capture One if you shoot Fuji. There just isn't. At best it's a little behind Lightroom, and it's not like Lightroom is particularly great, either. For every other brand, Capture One is nice. Not Fuji.

All DR200 and 400 do is push the shadows further after capture, no better than you can do yourself in editing/grading software. DR100 represents a half stop push to the exposure of shadow tones. (This is why Fuji's base ISO is 200; it's actually ISO 140, to underexpose highlights, and it automatically pushes the shadows up to where they would be for a real ISO 200, basically faking more dynamic range than the sensor actually has.*) DR200 represents a full stop push to shadows, after capture. DR400 is a two stop push, in theory, but the ISO isn't quite linear and it's actually more like a one-and-two-thirds stop push. End results: Capturing with DR100 and choosing to push the shadows up 0.5-1.6 stops in post is the same as capturing at DR200 or 400, except it's your choice to do so or not afterwards, while with the DR options it's permanently part of the file. There is no actual additional range to be had. Pro Neg S, shadows and highlights -2, and saturation -1 or -2, is still the flattest profile you can get out of a Fuji. In terms of grading video, the DR options are utterly pointless, and in fact detrimental. I wish there was a proper cinestyle colour profile for Fuji, but there's simply not. *For balance: This isn't just a complaint about Fuji. Every camera manufacturer does this, both for video and for stills. It makes their sensors look better in common noise tests and dynamic range tests. ISO 100 on most cameras these days is actually anywhere from ISO 50 to 80; I'm not aware of a single digital video or stills camera made in the last ten years which actually does measure ISO 100 at ISO 100.

Interesting what you say about the rubber. The X-T2 has that harder, rougher rubber/plastic, too. Makes me think that's the only type of covering they stock now; perhaps every Fuji camera made or repaired from now on will have that new covering. I like it, personally. More grippy, doesn't feel a cheap. As for the price, well, yeah. That's about what significant camera repairs cost. I've had a couple of repairs (non-Fuji) which have gone into four figures. But's that's just the nature of camera bodies. They're incredibly expensive to make, and they make very little profit. When you have to have a lot repaired, it's not unusual to end up paying half what a new body is worth, and I've heard of a few instances where the manufacturer has just outright replaced the body because it can be cheaper to do that than repair a broken one, by the itme you factor in the man hours on top of the parts cost. This is why I detest photographers who throw their gear around with the "it's just a tool" mentality. Tool or not, it represents a significant amount of money. No point risking damaging it if you can easily avoid doing so.

Basic answer to just get to the point: It's a bit of a gamble, with Fuji. Some people have taken Fuji cameras to the frozen tops of mountain ranges and to the middle of the hottest deserts and their gear has worked perfectly; other people have taken their camera out in a very slight drizzle and had everything totally break beyond repair within 5 minutes. If you're going to that extreme a place and you're photographing nature, I'd say don't go with Fuji. I like my Fuji cameras, but I still stick with Canon for nature & wildlife because mirrorless is still years behind in that department, and I'm not even talking about particularly harsh environments. Canon & Nikon are tougher, more reliable, and have features and lenses more suited to that kind of photography. The new Pentax K1 is also supposed to be really tough, though it doesn't have as good a lens selection as Nikon/Canon, and the image quality is no different. Extended answer for people who really don't understand or want further reasoning: Off the top of my head I can't remember the Fahrenheit figures, and I'm no good at converting, but in Celius, Fuji's X-T1 does -10˚C to 40˚C and humidty ranging from 10%-80%. I wouldn't push them much past that and expect them to work reliably. If you use them in more extreme conditions and they manage to work, good for you, you got lucky. It's not unheard of. But it's not reliable. Fuji products are weather resistant, not weather proof. I'm reluctant to use my Fujis when it's cold, and I never take them out in rain; the conditions you're talking about are well beyond what I would ever feel comfortable subjecting a Fuji camera to. But the bigger issue than just wether or not they will technically work, and why I'd steer you away from Fuji for this kind of thing, is the performance. Indoors, in a studio, I get about 325-350 shots out of one Fuji battery, compared to so many out of a Canon or Nikon that I've never actually had a battery fully drain. Outdoors, in standard English weather, I get around 250 shots out of one Fuji battery, compared to 800-1000 out of a Canon/Nikon battery. On colder days I've had <200 shots from a Fuji battery, where a Canon/Nikon battery will still be good for 500 or so. Those Fuji batteries die fast. All mirrorless systems eat up battery life 3x-4x faster than SLRs do. Additionally, focus also slows down, read/write times slow, and the screens can start to stutter at very high or low temperatures. The camera is still technically working, but it's nowhere near the performance it usually gives. In low temperatures you can stick it in High Performance mode and that will keep things ticking over more smoothly, but that eats up the battery even faster again. If you take it to a place with very high temperatures then High Performance mode will actually just burn out and damage the camera quicker. On top of that, Fuji's system simply isn't all that great for nature & wildlife. Not only does it lack many useful lens focal lengths, but the actual image files and colour profiles are geared toward portraits, primarily, with landscape as a bit of an afterthought, and they've not spent a single second thinking about much else. The entire sensor design is made for rendering smoother skin tones—specifically, Asian skin tones—and so it's not really the best choice for high frequency detail. That's not to say that they outright can't do things other than portraits, just that skin is what their #1 concern is. It's why, out of all the colour profiles in the cameras, five are advertised as being good for various styles of portrait, one is advertised as being good for landscape, and the rest are left as generic 'anything' profiles. There's also still no raw convertor which can get the same high frequency detail out of Fuji files as you could expect from a Canon or Nikon file, and the camera's own in-body processing has mandatory noise reduction which can't be fully turned off, so you're going to get smeared detail no matter what. I love the Fuji cameras for some jobs, and they do okay for nature, but why accept "okay"? There's no perfect trade upgrade here. If you want to ditch the Nikon gear and switch to Fuji—or any other mirrorless camera, really—you'll be saving some size and weight, but you'll be giving up a lot of reliability, speed, battery life, and, arguably, some image quality. For people shooting street, portrait, weddings, events, and travel, that's great. For people who want to take their gear into a sub-freezing tundra, it's just not a smart choice. If you feel the Nikon gear you already have is reliable, stick with it. If you don't think it is and you're looking to upgrade to something tougher, Fuji isn't the answer. The toughest commercially available cameras on the planet right now are the Canon 1D X mkII and the Nikon D5. From there you only move downwards in durability and operating temperature. Mirrorless is still a good 2-3 hardware generations away from being able to compete with SLR performance in harsh conditions, and Fuji specifically is probably the last brand I'd choose for nature, even if the durability, battery life, etc, was not an issue. Can they survive it? Maybe. It's not guaranteed. Are they a good choice even if they do survive? Probably not.

Depends how they've been processed, and how the lens was measured/tested. Some people only consider distortion to be warping beyond what you expect from a particular angle of view. For instance, the compression you get from a 200mm+ lens used for a portrait isn't considered 'distortion', even though it isn't a true representation of the subject. Similarly, some people expect a wide-angle lens to spread out the sides and corners of an image, so they don't consider that to be an error, either. In that sense, that example photo is quite distortion-free. Wide-angle lenses often suffer from barrel distortion, but that image doesn't buldge in at the middle, so someone looking for barrel distortion might consider that image to be free from faults. With Fuji lenses things are made more complicated because you can't mount them to other companies' bodies for testing, and Fuji's own bodies always apply a range of corrections—including distortion correction—to the images. You can turn that feature off, but it is never fully off, and it's on by default. Most raw convertors will also include these corrections by default. So you could have a case where one person simply uses everything with the default settings, and sees no distortion, but another person may have taken the time to disable all those corrections and will see some distortion. Fuji lenses are also flat field designs, which doesn't have anything to do with distortion from a technical point of view, but it does change how you use the lens and frame subjects for sharpest focus, which in turn may help minimise distortion compared to how you'd frame the scene if you were using a curved field lens. Basically, people using Fuji cameras tend to be more aware of keep the camera perfectly upright and straight, whereas someone using something like a Canon or Sony might not be so careful and very slightly tilt the camera, which could then exaggerate some distortions. tl;dr: If you look at images from the lens and you see distortions, they're distortions. If you look at images from the lens and don't notice any distortions, it's distortion-free. What you define as distortion and how much you're willing to accept or notice is entirely subjective. There's no such thing as a lens which is truly 100% technically distortion-free, but different people have different standards and expect/will allow different types and degrees of distortion for different focal lengths.

Now that would explain why the pre-production X-T2s are being sent out with NP-W126 batteries. I think everyone assumed/hoped for a new battery; if Fuji are pulling a Canon and simply revising the same battery housing, that gives us that 'new' battery whilst still making the camera compatible with the older batteries. I thought it was weird it had the W126. A revised W126 coming explains it perfectly.

If you've got Photoshop, you can combine several medium-long exposures into one very long exposure, cutting down the need for excessive ND filters; look up 'mean' stacking. It's still best to use an ND filter, to cut down on the number of photos you need to take to reach your desired exposure time, but it at least means you don't need to worry about the hassle and expense of things like the Lee system; use plain old screw-in ND filters, like the ones B+W, Tiffen, and Hoya make, instead. Added benefit is slightly more accurate colours and a sharper picture, as haze becomes a non-issue, and less noise as there's no chance of the sensor gathering enough heat to cause thermal noise. In other words, ten 30-second exposures stacked up in Photoshop simply produce a higher-quality image than one 5-minute exposure, and it's much easier to get an ND filter which can cut the light down for a 30-second exposure than it is to get one which cuts enough light to achieve 5-minutes. 'Course, Photoshop isn't for everyone. Totally cool if you want to do it the 'real' way. Just thought I'd throw this out there as an additional option for people interested in very long exposure but maybe turned off by the apparent need for some of these cumbersome and expensive ND filter systems.

Sounds like the 100-400 would definitely not be for you. And yeah, 23mm is kinda in between. A lot of people only really shoot at the longest or widest ends of their zoom range. So, I'd consider the 16mm. It's f/1.4 so you've got low light covered, it's close to the wide end of that zoom range—you've already got the 56 for the long end—and it's pretty distortion-free, compared to most similar wide-angle lenses, so it's pretty good for architecture and casual/environmental portraits. (Of course you'd ever use it for a formal headshot, obviously.)

Glad to see I'm not the only one hanging on to a bit of Canon gear. Those Sigma Art lenses, man. I was told way back that they were thinking about bringing them to Fuji, guess it never worked out. Shame.

I want a graphite one. (Or regular silver would do, really.) I've been asking everyone I know for months now, and heard nothing back. Everybody is assuming there will be a graphite edition again, at a higher price like before, but all the ones that have been sent out so far—at least that anyone I know has seen—have been plain black. Which is to be expected. The T1 didn't launch with graphite silver as an option, either. Frankly I think it's just damn stupid that the Pro bodies aren't available in silver, but that's another topic for another day.

VAT and other customs import/handling charges at a gamble. Many people manage to import a whole bunch of items without ever being charged a single penny, but then you'll get horror stories of somebody being caught once and being billed for thousands. Depending on the country you are in, you can also be caught after you've imported the item, and charged massive fines (and even jail time, in some countries) for trying to evade tax. Like I said, it's a total gamble. 99 times out of 100, you'll be totally fine. But if you happen to be that 1 time out of 100... well, you get the idea, it's your risk to take or not. As far as quality goes, there's no reason to expect an imported item to be worse than one you'd buy in a highstreet shop. However, be aware that if an item has taken a very long time to travel, it may have been subjected to changes in climate and bashed about and gotten damp and who-knows-what. So just be prepared for that. Again, usually it's fine. Every now and then, things may have taken a bit more of a beating than you'd like. That's just the risk of international shipping. Generally, second hand prices in the Americas and western Europe tend to be about the same as gey import prices. Most shops will offer at least a 6 month guarantee on any second hand items they sell, too, which is better than the longer-but-only-valid-in-China warranties that grey import companies usually offer. So I do think it's worth holding on and waiting to see what turns up in your local stores. Sometimes buying a good condition used item does wind up being a much better deal than importing a new one.

1. Acros As darngooddesign said, Acros requires the bigger sensor in the X-Pro2 and X-T2. However, all Acros is is the standard monochrome profile with an 'S' shape tone curve applied, and then some fake 'grain'. You can apply these same adjustments to a raw file in Lightroom using the Tone Curve (select 'medium contrast') and Effects panels for grain, or of course you can take the photo in Photoshop for more careful editing. Other software will have similar options, if you don't use Lightroom. 2. I've not noticed a change in speed myself, but you're not the only person who has said the write speeds seem to be slower. Might be a problem with only certain brands of memory card? I'm not sure. 3. The front dial always controls two things—by default, shutter speed and ISO—so yes, you do have to push the dial in to access ISO. Simply turning it without pushing it in will change the shutter speed up or down in 1/3rd stops, but if you want to change shutter speed by a full stop or more then you have to do that with the shutter dial on the top of the camera. However, if you set the top shutter dial to 'T', then the front dial can control the shutter speed freely, up and down as much as you want. You still push the front dial in to access ISO control. You can also change the control when you push in the front dial. If you open the main camera menu and go to the second system settings menu (blue 2), you'll see an option called 'button/dial setting'. In there, go to 'function (fn) setting'. The second button, Fn2, is the front dial when pressed in. You can change that to whatever you like, and move ISO to one of the other function buttons. (Some function buttons are disabled depending on what focus mode you're using.) 4. There's an easier way to solve this fourth problem. If you turn the camera to manual focus, you can then press the AF-L button to start autofocus. When you stop pressing the AF-L button, autofocus stops and the camera won't change focus. This is called 'back button focus' on most cameras; Fuji just make it part of the manual focus behaviour. So you point the camera at whatever you want to focus at, press the AF-L button to autofocus, then let go fo the button and now the focus stays where it is, no matter how many times you press the shutter. No need to hold a button to hold focus; you can let go and focus doesn't move. The only drawback is you have to remember to press the AF-L button, because half-pressing the shutter will no longer trigger autofocus at all. It takes a little while to get used to, but once you learn it, it'll be no problem and you'll wonder how you ever used a camera without it.