aceflibble

I've seen a couple of Damien Lovegrove's images printed out to gallery dimensions at trade shows; I can't say I got out a tape measure and noted down how big they were exactly, but they must have been at least 4' across if not more. Looked fine to me. I generally disagree with the idea that bigger prints don't have to be as sharp, as in my experience people do walk right up to them and peer at every little detail. For that reason, I don't really like printing my Fuji files any larger than A2 or more commonly 24"x18". Even then I find they're only just acceptable by my standards. 16" on the long side—around A3—is the largest I usually choose to print at. That said, my subjects are a little different compared to the likes of Mr. Lovegrove's, and absurdly fine abstract detail never holds up to printing as well as a traditional portrait or landscape. If my images weren't scrutinised as heavily and as closely then I would probably be more comfortable with the A2 prints and would risk the occasional much larger print from a Fuji file.

If you manually set a white balance by selecting a Kelvin colour temperature and use a grey card or other neutral reference then your white balance should come up perfectly neutral. If you select a white balance using the presets, such as Fine or Incandescent, when you check it with your grey reference you will find there is a slight blue and green tint. (The exception is the Underwater preset, which tints towards magenta.) Auto white balance is tricky because even when photographing the same subject under the same light, it might change white balance between shots. It's hard to test consistently, but in my experience the Fuji auto white balance does tend to run a little cool for my taste, so I set the AWB to be +1 -1 (one point towards red and one towards yellow) to compensate. Of course if you shoot raw then you can simply correct the white balance in whatever processing software you use. If you shoot jpg and have been happy with the colours you get until now, I wouldn't worry about it; cooler tones have always been Fuji's style. If you shoot jpg and really want to be sure you're getting a truly neutral white balance then yes, set your white balance manually using the Kelvin option and use a grey card or other grey reference whenever you are unsure of what Kelvin temperature to choose.

Okay, let me break this down for you because you are, categorically, wrong. You can see in the very images in my original post that the raw files display pincushion distortion and the in-camera .jpg files display mirrored stretching originating from the centre. The only things changed between shots was turning the lens optimiser on and off for .jpg and raw respectively, and changing film simulation every other shot. Focus distance was not changed, no additional processing or develop settings were changed. Lens optimisation on (jpg) and off (raw) only. As I said in the original post, I did run the images through other software in order to double-check colour accuracy and the same discrepancy was shown in all. To help you, here are three examples of the same test shot which explicitly illustrate the pincushion distortion of the raw file and the corrected Fuji .jpg. Two full images, .jpg with lens optimisation on and then the raw with lens optimisation off: Now the .jpg overlayed on top of the raw image, showing the difference in size withint he frame as caused by pincushion distortion correction pushing the image outwards originating from the centre: And third, close crops of the top line of colour patches with a grid overlayed so you can see exactly how straight the jpg is compared to the inwards bow of the raw: To deny that the lens optimisation is correcting for pincushion distortion would be to say either: Fuji's .jpg processing just naturally stretches everything out from the centre regardless of whether lens optimisation is on or off and by pure luck the 56mm has exactly the right amount of pincushion distortion to perfectly equal out the Fuji stretching; Fuji have broken the laws of physics and have created a 56mm lens which can generate an image with absolutely no degree of distortion at a focus distance of 4' 6" and Lightroom and Silkypix are so utterly confounded by this display of literal God-like dimensional manipulation that their software adds in distortion to the raw files just so those pesky Fuji files can adhere to the laws of our mortal realm; or you're wrong and just don't like to admit that you were mistaken about something related to Fuji. It is factually not possible for a lens of this focal length and focused at that distance to not display some distortion, and the raw files with lens optimisation turned off show this, yet the Fuji .jpgs, with the lens optimisation turned on, do indeed show no distortion. More importantly than that, I have now posted a total of five images of the same scene taken with the same framing at the same distance with the same lens and the same focus which explicitly display the difference in distortion between the raw file with lens optimisation off and the jpg file with lens optimisation on. I will also note that I get the same results with my X-T1 as I do with the X-T10, so no, it's not a bug with the X-T10, or, if it is, then it's a bug in the X-T1 as well. Your information is incorrect and you are mistaken. I have now proven this twice over with five illustrations. It's okay, you can just relay the correct information in the future. We all get things wrong sometimes. If you still believe that I am mistaken and my examples are inaccurate, please explain why, because I sincerely would like to hear your reasoning.

Billingham Hadley Large for me, and a Lowepro Pro Roller X200 for big jobs. The Billingham fits: A Mamiya RZ67 Pro II D medium format body, three backs and two portrait lenses. A Canon 1D X, one spare battery, three portrait lenses, two flashguns and a trigger. A Canon 7D mark II, three spare batteries, one wildlife lens, a thermos of tea and a sandwich. A Fuji X-T1, an X-T10 and an X100S, one spare battery for each, general purpose three lens set, two flashguns and a trigger. In addition to any of the above, one pocket always has general cleaning tools, a ColourChecker Passport, spare AA and AAA batteries, spare memory cards and a couple of varieties of USB and FireWire cable. The Lowepro is for when I want to take two sets of those kits (e.g. Mamiya + Fuji) as well as either up to six flashguns or two continuous lights, or if I'm spending one night away. (More than one night does require packing a second bag, you can't fit a decent suitcase worth of clothes into the Lowepro.) I will say that, though the Hadley Large does a good job of holding any of my typical kits, it's not exactly comfortable to carry. The shoulder pad—which they have the nerve to not include as standard—is still really rigid and the bag doesn't hang in a way which is comfortable. Nothing else will fit everything, though! The Mamiya's what really does it. Just too damn big and too square to fit in anything else. When Fuji release a 70mm f/2 and a body with a resolution over 30mp, I can finally sell that monster and get a smaller bag, properly downsize. Doesn't look like that will be for many years, though.

The problem is that there's no way to only have back-button focusing. Either you have it so the shutter still activates the focus or you have it so moving the focus ring will shift focus, and the rings on the newer lenses are very sensitive. It's pretty much impossible to hold a Fuji camera without some part of one of your hands touching the focus ring in some way. If you're trying to get perfect focus with something like the 60mm lens up-close or the 56mm lens at f/1.2, that is a huge, huge problem. By allowing proper back button focus to work in AF-S and AF-C modes—AF-L activating focus when pressed and disabling the shutter from initiating focus—you would no longer have the risk of accidentally shifting focus with the manual focus ring.

This very test shows otherwise. You can see each top row (all Fuji .jpg, optimisation on) is shifted compared to the bottom (all raw, optimisation off), with the shift originating from the centre. That's what I meant when I said the optimisation misalignment gives away which row of colour patches is from which source. The colour patches towards the left (red, orange) move more towards the left and the patches on the right side (purple, magenta) have shifted over more towards the right. The green patch is the only one truly centered in the original frame and it's aligned properly to the unaltered row. That is the result of correction of pincushion distortion; the image has been expanded outwards from the centre. In fact, if you look very closely, you can actually see on the raw rows (bottom of each pair) that the patches at each side are, very slightly, leaning inwards. (I.e. pincushion distortion.) In other words, those very images explicitly show the distortion correction that the Fuji lens optimisation applies to the 56mm lens. If it didn't apply any correction for pincushion distortion the patches would align exactly with the raw files, or, even if I were to nudge the camera between pairs of shots, one row would be uniformly misaligned, not misaligned one way on one side of the image and in the other direction on the opposite side. Following that, the 14mm and 35mm lenses both show barrel distortion when optimisation is turned off and focused at a medium or near distance. The 35mm's is fairly mild, the 14mm's is very heavy. I've not adequately tested the 23mm to tell and I do not yet have a 16mm, but I would assume those also show barrel distortion, given their focal lengths. I also do not have the 90mm yet—and do not intend to ever buy it—but given the 56mm displays some pincushioning, it should be safe to assume that the 90mm does as well. I don't own any of the zooms anymore, either, but I do remember the 18-55 showing both barrel and pincushion distortion when shot with optimisation off, at the wide and long ends respectively, and at the relevant focus distances. Bear in mind that, to an APS-size surface receiving an image focused at this distance (not perfectly, but as close to 4' 6" as I could humanly manage), the only focal length which would be able to produce an image truly without any distortion whatsoever would be a 51.4mm lens, which does not exist in the Fuji line other than with zoom lenses. Though zoom lenses, at any focal length and focus distance, rarely exhibit a properly flat image anyway due to the nature of their construction. So, there you have it. The 56mm lens does display pincushion distortion at this focus distance (and one would assume, further) and Fuji's lens optimisation is correcting for that. If the former wasn't true then Fuji would be breaking the laws of physics and if the latter was wrong then those pictures would not be misaligned as they are. I will add that I was surprised to see pincushion distortion in these raw files, since I usually leave lens optimisation on and in any case, my natural assumption without doing the maths would be that a 56mm lens would show barrel distortion, not pincushion, but there you are. I tend to think of pincushion distortion only showing up >160mm at this sort of range, but that kind of thinking is just down to which lenses you have the most experience with, I suppose. The 56mm is not that far off the tipping point into barrel distortion, anyway. Shorten it by 5mm and it would be there. In fact, thinking about it now, it's actually surprising that the un-optimised lens has as little distortion as it does, and for a 'portrait' lens like this, pincushion at this distance is far more preferable than barrel!

^^ That's almost right, but true back button focusing stops the camera from trying to focus when you press the shutter button. The AF-L does still cause (and locks) focus, but so does the shutter. Fuji does not offer the option to stop the shutter from activating autofocus, other than switching the camera to manual focus mode. There's a truckload of things people ask for that never happen. Proper back button focus has been one of them from the very start. It's also one of the most straight-forward fixes. They've changed functionality and function options of many buttons (most recently the macro button), so if they've not sorted proper back button focusing yet, it is very unlikely they ever will. Note that, again, I use the word 'unlikely' and not 'impossible'.

+1 for the Cactus system. Adjust power in 1/10th stops, even with flashes which don't normally offer such increments, and it can mix any flash from any brand and either have them fire to a linear scale, or you can set it to equalise each unit so they all act as if they're the same model. Batteries seem to last slightly longer than the Yongnuo units I've tried, too, and the range and refresh rates are better. They do cost a fraction more than Yongnuo, though (still far cheaper than Canon/Nikon) and they seem to be slightly harder to get hold of in some areas. If you can get them where you life, though, Cactus are definitely the way to go. Even before I switched to Fuji, I had already sold off my Canon flash gear to use Cactus instead. edit: oh and hey, the Cactus units do also support the Yongnuo units, just as every other brand.

The α7s isn't actually any better at high ISO than any of the other Sony α7 cameras. It looks better at a pixel level because it has a lower resolution, but if you take those higher-resolution Sony cameras and simply scale their files down to the same 12mp file the α7s makes, you get the same results. Video is slightly different because it's not captured then scaled in quite the same way, so the α7s does produce slightly nicer results then. Tony Northrup reaffirmed all this seven months ago, when he was making those videos. Of course, now there's the α7rII... In any case, Fuji's sensors are already manufactured by Sony. (As are Nikon's.) The only practical difference between the sensors Sony makes for Fuji and the sensors used by Sony themselves (and Nikon) is the Fuji sensors are APS-C and Sony uses 35mm. If you take a Sony α7r or Nikon D800 and crop in, you get the same image as you'd get from an uncropped Fuji; their 36mp 35mm sensors and the Fuji 16mp APS-C sensor have virtually the same pixel pitch. With Fuji, you're already getting the same high-ISO performance as you get on those Sony cameras. The only difference is the Sonys give you a larger frame, so you have more to work with; at ISO 6400 and above, a 36mp photo scaled down to 10mp is going to look cleaner than a 16mp photo scaled in the same way. This is how the higher-resolution α7 cameras actually match the α7s in low-light performance, once you take the final image size into account. Once people learn to think about how the final image looks and not how the captured image looks, you'll find there is much less excitement about every new sensor.

Well, since you're the only person to respond in a week , I think I'll just say: all of the top lines are Fuji colours, all of the bottom ones in each pair are Adobe. Actually, the misalignment caused by the Fuji lens optimisation gives this away! I think the heavy change in green is linked to the difference in white balance between Fuji and industry standards. Fuji film was known for having a cooler colour balance, so they set the white balance to run slightly blue. This probably makes green tones look unnaturally dull, so when the camera processes the .jpg files they have it increase the saturation and brightness a little and for some film simulations it also shifts green tones slightly back towards yellow. Conversely, Fuji doesn't seem to apply this shift to the yellow tones, which are simply left duller/bluer in most film simulations, or it could be that the corrections they apply to green bleed over into the yellow; either way, Fuji seems to be sacrificing yellow for the sake of green. (Classic Chrome being the exception, which has everything shifted slightly warm.) Adobe Lightroom, and other programs, don't know the intentions behind Fuji's design decisions, so they don't over-correct the green. All the software knows is the colour balance is a little cooler than it perhaps should be, so greens are represented 'accurately' with a slightly drab and slightly bluer tone. (Velvia being the exception, which does have much more yellow in the greens; Adobe probably guessed that this would be used a lot for landscapes so they optimised the green tone themselves.) In other words, Fuji's style is partly done at capture (white balance) and partly after (processing the .jpg), whereas Lightroom is just aiming for an accurate representation of the capture (white balance). For the lenses, Fuji applies profiles to even the raw files to fix colour fringing, distortion and colour casts. You can turn it off in most Fuji cameras, but once you've taken a picture with it on, it can't be removed from the file, even if you shoot raw. Adobe Lightroom warns you of this when you look at a Fuji image in the develop module. Every Fuji lens has some 'optimisation' applied to it, but some more than others. The 56mm has fairly little, just a tiny bit of distortion and fringing correction. The wider you go, the more heavily these things apply. The 35mm without optimisation has quite a lot of colour fringing, which in some cases can interfere with colour rendition (e.g. you photograph something purple and the camera reduces purple fringing, making the edges of your subject look drab) and wider than f/5.6 it shows some colour bleed, which is also corrected by Fuji's lens optimisation. The 60mm lens has less distortion and aberration fixes applied, but it has a warmer colour cast to it which is half-fixed by the software and makes it inappropriate for testing colour charts. The 14mm simply has so much distortion correction applied to it that everything is smeared. I've not yet tested the other Fuji lenses to see exactly what optimisation Fuji is doing.

There aren't any. With the camera set to manual focus, back-button focusing works. With single or continuous autofocus, the shutter release always initates focus, and the AF-L and AE-L buttons lock the focus and exposure. (Or you can make one of them lock both simultaneously.) Yes, it's silly and not in any way ideal. No, I don't know why Fuji haven't put in a simple back button focus option yet. Since they've not done it yet I find it unlikely they'll ever do it.

The 18-55 and 16-55 are optically the best. They are optically indistingishable from the primes, except for the maximum and minimum apertures. The 18-55 is also fairly light. If you want a zoom simply so you don't have to switch lenses as often, those are the lenses to go for. The 10-24 is alright. It gives you focal length options you don't have and it's optically good. If you simply want to expand your wide-angle options, though, the 14mm and 16mm are both a little sharper and faster. 10-24 isn't really a focal length that is going to adequately replace your primes. This is the lens to get if you want to add to your existing primes as a full kit, it's not a lens to get if you want to leave your primes at home. The 18-135 is optically the weakest, and for most of its focal length it is the slowest lens. It's also comparatively large and heavy. If you want to expand your focal length options and you want to have just one lens on your camera and never change, this is the one to get. You're swapping quality for convenience. There's no right option here. All depends on why you want a zoom and what you expect to get out of it compared to your primes. As for colour, I'm of the mind that every Fuji looks better in silver. The silver X-T1 is also slightly, slightly more weather-resistant and tougher than the black version. Just bear in mind with the X-T1 that silver comes with an additional cost.

Every time I've used the 50-140 it has made some noise with OIS on, and every other lens with IS also makes some noise and low vibration. It's just the nature of IS, and why professional videographers use other methods of stabilising their footage instead of relying on lens IS.

70mm f/2 is the one I am constantly shouting at Fuij for. I don't want anything faster, I don't want IS, I don't want macro, I don't want weather sealing, I don't want an apodisation filter. Just a plain, sharp, fast-focusing and light-as-possible 70mm f/2. My Fujis are nice to use for a lot of things, but when it comes to tight portraits, my Mamiya 210mm f/4.5 (rough 35mm equivalent: 105mm f/2.2) beats the Fuji 56mm, 60mm, 90mm and 50-140mm senseless. Even the old and simple Canon 100mm f/2 knocks the Fujis out of the park when it comes to headshots. The moment a 70mm f/2 Fuji lens is released, I'll be selling my 56mm and 60mm lenses and I'll probably finally be able to sell my medium format system, too.

Wide-angle lens wide open with an almost white-to-black subject? I'd be surprised if there wasn'[/t] fringing everywhere.

I'm in much the same boat, though I am getting on with the X-T10 okay after having 'trained' myself to get used to smaller cameras with the X100S and X-T1. My hands aren't that large but my fingers are proportionately long, so with anything smaller than a 1D X my little and ring fingers are left hanging in the air. I probably would still exclusively use the 1D X and medium format cameras if my back wasn't so bad; I am now very limited by how much weight I can carry. If there's ever some kind of 'lightweight' 1D or somebody makes a mirrorless camera larger than the X-T1 & grip, I'll gladly buy those. I still prefer a larger unit, despite having gotten used to smaller cameras now. To that end, I do recommend saving for a T1 (you can buy them second hand for not much more than a T10 costs) and giving that a try, or consider using a smaller, entry-level DSLR, which are typically the size of a T1, to get used to handling a smaller body. Work your way down. A tip I picked up from Mr. Lovegrove is holding the camera vertically with one hand, without the need for a 1D/D4 style body or a battery grip. He often holds his cameras with his left hand around the lens, index finger on the shutter, which gives you one-handed vertical operation without the need for a grip. Trying that out helped me a lot with the transition from larger bodies to these smaller ones. For horizontal shooting, I now simply curl in my little and ring fingers up into my palm, with the near edge of the camera resting on the second knuckle of my ring finger. It's not ideal, but it's a little more stable and doesn't look quite as silly as having two fingers just waving about on nothing. Give it a try with the X100T. And by the way, my understanding is that the X-T10 was made precisely because the X-T1 was proving popular, but a little too large and expensive to really take hold as well as Fuji would have liked. The X-T10's lower price mostly comes from the fact it is smaller. The impression I have been given is that it would not really be viable to make a T1-size body at the price point of the T10; they wouldn't make enough money back on it. (As it is, the T1 itself only generates around £40 profit per body sold.) So it is very, very unlikely Fuji will ever make a body of the Pro/T1 size at the T10 price point. This is where you will need to wait for a body to be a couple of years old or replaced by a new generation, and then search for a secondhand unit. It's a tiny add-on that just deepens the finger grip, it does not actually make the silhouette of the camera larger. It's good for people like me where the main problem is finger length, and a deeper grip helps accommodate, but for overall large hands it is of no benefit at all. Also they're charging £90 for it and that's a bloody joke.

1.) Third-stop shutter adjustment is available on most Fuji cameras, typically via a front control dial. (Sometimes a rear dial in certain modes.) Also, while I do not believe this excuses the full-stop main shutter dial, I will point out that most film cameras, which the Fuji body styles try to emulate, also have shutter dials marked only in full stops. Even my ludicrously-expensive-at-the-time Mamiya medium format camera only has the shuter marked in half-stops. You do get used to these things. Again, I don't believe it fully excuses the slightly awkward and outdated dial, but there is a reason for it, and, as I said, most Fuji cameras do let you adjust the shutter and aperture in third-stops anyway, via additional controls. 2.) It already does what you're asking for. If you use spot metering, the metering is tied to the focus point selected and the spot metering is taken from a sample size matching the smallest size of focus area. (Note that making the focus area larger does not increase the size of the area used for spot metering.) On the X-T1 you can change it in the menu to decouple the spot metering from the focus point so spot metering is always in the middle, regardless of where the focus point is set. This does also mean that, when coupled (which, I think, is the default), yes, you can move the spot metering around. I forget if the X100S has this option in the menu or not. My personal opinion is that if you're trying to shoot a scene with a large dynamic range then you shouldn't be relying on any form of automatic metering anyway. 3.) I half agree and half not. I have been screaming for a 70-73mm f/2 lens for the best part of a year and I never see my friends in Fuji PR without mentioning it to them. A 100-105mm equivalent is an absolute must, as far as I care, and the moment it it out I will be selling my 56mm and 60mm lenses. That said, I absolutely do not want it to have macro functionality, or any other feature which would increase its price, size or slow down focusing. (E.g. weather sealing, image stabilisation, an apodisation filter, etc.) As for longer macro lenses, in the Canon and medium format worlds, focal lengths in excess of 150mm are very popular for macro photography precisely because of the longer working distance. HSS is physically possible with mirrorless but it is much harder and much more expensive to do than with a SLR. Given the limited uses for HSS, you're better off simply using ND filters. Leaf shutters are expensive and typically have to be made for the lens and are not something you can stick on a body without pricing yourself out of the market. If HSS is something you feel you rally need, mirrorless as a format—not just Fuji, but any mirrorless camera—is not going to be for you. There are compromises that can be made, some bodies can make certain advancements, but this is one of those areas where mirrorless is always going to be 5-10 years behind SLR and if it's that important to you, you simply are not the target market for mirrorless. Most of your third point, by the way, makes it sound like what you really want is a medium format system but somehow 1/6th the size, cost and weight. The cost of a digital back for a mid-90s medium format camera is about the same as a body and a set of three lenses costs, by the way. If that's the kind of shooting experience and options you want and the size doesn't bother you, you'll be better off going that route. 4.) No company currently offers what you're asking for. The closest you can get is the Cactus system, which a) is very cheap and works with every brand, or any mixture of brands, you can name. It doesn't have TTL, but since one Cactus trigger and any number of Cactus flashguns gives you full remote control in 1/10th-stop increments and flash zoom control right from the trigger, you have far more contol than any other flash system gives you, anyway. And that's just with one trigger on the camera, since the flashes themselves have the reciever built-in. No company in the world can give you radio-transmitted TTL without both triggers and recievers. The next closest thing would be Canon's commander mode, on their lower-end bodies using the pop-up flash, but that's not radio triggering and it is very limited. This part sounds very confusing, to me, because you seem to have a very strong idea of what you want and make out that you have quite demanding needs, yet you're asking for small-as-possible TTL, which to me screams happy snappy amateur. If you want and need professional control, why use TTL and why care about whether or not you need to buy another reciever? If you just want and need something small and quick, just stick the flashgun on top of the camera and bounce it off a wall. Fill flash outdoors? Use an ND filter and you're set. It reads like you don't actually know what you want and need. 5.) That's more of a technical limitation. There's only so much space in a body. The WP-126 is used by most Fuji cameras: the Pro, E and T lines all use it. I believe the M and A also use it, but I'm not sure. The X100 line is a problem because they're trying to cram far more in to a smaller-size body; you've probably noticed from the weight that the X100S is the 'densest' camera Fuji makes, weighing much more than other cameras of its size. I would love it if every camera I have used the same battery, but it's just not physically possible. Just as a 5D and a 1D-X don't use the same batteries, there are always going to be a few models in any product line which use different batteries. You also underestimate the power needed for fast sync. Either you have to make the flash burst, greatly increasing the power needed, or you make it shorter but prime and latch it, making the system overall use more power. Either way, HSS uses more power than regular use. I say this as someone who likes his Fujis, but also likes Sony's mirrorless cameras, has been impressed with micro 4/3 and still uses several Canon digital cameras, digital medium format, film medium format and 35mm film: mirrorless is not for you. It simply sounds like you're either completely misunderstanding what different types of camera and different systems do, or you're simply so set on one method of shooting that you're unlikely to learn to change to the mirrorless way of shooting. Your first couple of points illustrate a lack of understanding of basic functionality of your cameras, and your later remarks suggest you'd simply be much better off using an SLR camera, or even a medium format. I do not defend Fuji, typically. I give their PR hell all the time, especially when it comes to that 70mm lens. But, one lens focal length aside, none of your complaints hold water. You just don't seem to know what you're holding or why you're holding it.

I usually prefer silver on Fuji. (I am going to be very angry if the Pro2 is only made in black, again.) When the first images of theX-T10 came out, it was the first body which I thought looked cheap and bad in silver and better in black. When I went to pick my X-T10 up, I got to make my choice in person and I went for silver. It looks just as good in person as silver does on every other Fuji. I don't know why the promo pictures all make the silver X-T10 look tacky—maybe they shot it with a polariser on—but ignore them. If you like silver on other Fuji's, you'll like the silver X-T10. Of course, if you like black on other Fujis, you'll prefer black on the X-T10. The Graphite SIlver X-T1 isn't really relevant because that's a different finish method and does look different. It's more sparkly and generally a more genuine metallic finish, and a tone darker. The silver used on other Fujis, including the X-T10, is brighter and smoother. As for the 18-135, it's a very 'eh' lens. If you detest changing lenses and you have to cover absolutely everything, it's your only choice. If you simply want to cover most things, get the 18-55 instead, it's a much better optic. If you want the best optics and want to cover a good range, go with primes. The cashback offer is good for the 18-135, but it's even better if you buy two or more prime lenses: £75 back for the first lens, £150 back for every additional lens after that. Three lenses gets you £375 back, which is pretty much the cost of the 35mm f/1.4 lens; buy two other primes, get the 35 for free, effectively. The other benefit to primes or the 18-55 is they don't dwarf the X-T10 as much. Do not underestimate how small and light the X-T10 is, and how huge and unwieldy that makes larger lenses feel. The 18-135 is significantly larger than the X-T10. The 18-55 is smaller than the 18-135 and a lot lighter, and is in fact lighter than the X-T1. The 56mm, 16mm and 90mm primes are all larger/heavier than the X-T10, but every other prime is smaller/lighter and balances well.

Then you don't want to put any filter on that lens. It's a decent optic as it is, but it's not the most flawless lens out there and with the pixel pitch of the Fuji cameras, any additional glass you put on the front will either soften the image or increase glare and ghosting, depending on the nature of the filter. A simple coated clear protective filter will do the least damage—Hoya, B+W and Tiffen all make good ones—but even that is going to degrade the lens somewhat. It's not physically possible to add more glass to the front and maintain the same image quality. Simply keeping the lens hood on does fully protect the front element from knocks by the simple act of physically blocking anything from touching it, and it won't decrease image quality at all. (Or in fact can help, in the case of preventing glare and flare.) If you want to keep the image quality the same, that really is the only thing that will do it.

If you're shooting a wedding, don't take any risks. Stick with a DSLR. I've shot in tiny, sticky-floored and very dark clubs with Fuji cameras, but it was by no means easy or fast and the X-T10 and X-T1 4.0 isn't proving any better. The improved low light AF performance isn't really for 'low light', it's more for 'medium light'. It still hunts, it's still slow, it still misses. I'm not saying it is utterly impossible to shoot a wedding with Fuji cameras, but between the dodgy focus and the battery life, I simply would not risk a job like a wedding, which you cannot possibly re-shoot, on a Fuji camera, or any other mirrorless for that matter. In another 5-10 years, maybe. Right now, it would just be completely irresponsible to take that kind of risk with peoples' one and only big day. DSLR works perfectly for weddings, you know it works perfectly for weddings, you should only be using what absolutely, definitely, 100% works.

I wouldn't put any filter on that lens. Leave the lens hood on and the front element will be protected from everything, unless you purposefully pour water down it.

I typically test my new cameras and lenses with a simple product set-up and a ColorChecker Passport just to make sure everything is working properly, but this time around with the X-T10 I decided to also directly test the Fuji in-camera film simulations against Lightroom's rendering. First, some notes on equipment and settings: Lights used were two InterFit daylight balanced continuous lights, which I frequently use for product photography. They're nearly perfectly balanced. (Tested with several shades of grey card, they consistently give a white balance of 5,540k needing a tint of just +2 towards magenta.) I tested the X-T10 with the 14mm, 35mm, 56mm and 60mm lenses, however I am only posting the results from the 56mm as I found this to be the most neutral. The JPG files of the 14mm and 35mm are given a lot more 'optimisation' by the camera and the 60mm has a slightly warm colour cast to it. The 56mm lens does still have some optimisation applied to it, though. Camera settings for all shots were ISO 200, 1/400th and f/4. Other settings were RAW+F, white balance set to Daylight, sharpness -1, noise reduction -2. Everything else left at default/0. Lightroom left everything at default/as shot/0, only reducing the default sharpening of 25 down to 15 and changing the colour profile to the appropriate film simulation. Before you look at the images and try to guess which is which, I want to mention Fuji's white balance. Their 'daylight' white balance is, in fact, not a daylight white balance. A true daylight white balance should be 5,500k with no tint. (Some people argue daylight should be 5,600k.) Fuji's daylight balance, however, reads at 5,200k with a +7 tint towards magenta. This is clearly a cooler balance than the industry standard used by everybody else. I double-checked with my X100S and that gave the same 5,200k +7 result. Not only that, but an actual perfect white balance of these Fuji files comes out as 5,350k +28 (Lightroom auto) to 5,150k +35 (manually selecting a perfect balance). I double-checked this in SilkyPix and got the exact same results. I then tested again with a Canon camera and that read 5,570k and +5 in-file and 5,620k +6 corrected, which is much closer to what any daylight balance should be reading as. This suggests that Fuji are running their colour much greener than it should be, either by having green read too strongly or magenta too weakly. I will note that when I first bought a Fuji camera, the X100S, right away I felt the colour balances were all running a bit cool and I tweaked them all to run +1 towards yellow and red/magenta. Testing the X-T10 now, it seems I have been right to do this. Of course, some people like Fuji film specifically because it has a cooler tone to it than the neutral-warm colours of Kodak, so this white balance bias may have been completely intentional by Fuji in order to replicate the cooler bias of their film stock. Even so, I think they've gone maybe a little too far with the green tint. So, on to the actual images. In order, we have Provia/Standard, Velvia/Vivid, Astia/Soft, Classic Chrome, Pro Negative High and Pro Negative Standard. I will not yet tell you whether the in-camera rendering or the Lightroom rendering is first or second in each pairing. That's our test, let's see if people can actually pick out which renderings they think are Fuij's or Adobe's. All I will say is that there are no 'trick' pairings, i.e. I didn't change the colour in any way, there are no mismatched pairs, etc. Each pair does contain one Fuji rendering and one Adobe rendering of the same film simulation. And now the Monochromes. In order we have Monochrome, Monochrome + Yellow filter, Monochrome + Red filter and Monochrome + Green filter. No, I did not test the Sepia tone, because you have to be out of your mind to use Sepia. My own observation is that the aqua, blue, purple and magenta colours barely change at all between Lightroom and in-camera, red only changes a noticable amount in one film simulation and yellow changes noticeably in two. The biggest offender is green, which is never matched well other than in Classic Chrome. The Classic Chrome simulation definitely is the one that Adobe and Fuji are the most closely-matched. I also think it's interesting that mono and mono+Y are hardly different at all, with just a slight darkening of blue in one of the renderings of mono+Y, and that the green patch, which is the biggest problem for the colour renderings, is almost perfectly equal in all the monochrome renderings. So, guess away. In each pairing, which do you think is Fuji and which do you think is Adobe? Make sure your monitor is calibrated properly! I'll give the answers in a few days.

I've been doing some colour testing today (mostly looking at in-camera rendering vs Lightroom) and I found the X-T10's daylight white balance is noticably 'off' compared to what Lightroom thinks it should be. (Note: Lightroom's WB is matched by Canon and most Nikon and Sony cameras and is based on the decades-old standard that 5,500k is daylight.) The in-camera files that were set to daylight balance which reads as 5,200k w/ +7 tint towards magenta, whereas Lightroom's daylight balance is 5,500k and +10 towards magenta. Interestingly, using Lightroom's auto WB gives a reading of 5,350k w/ +28 tint towards magenta and using the WB picker on a grey patch gives me 5,150k and a +35 tint towards magenta. This is a ColorChecker target under daylight balance InterFit lights which I use for product photography. I tested with the 14mm, 35mm, 56mm and 60mm lenses. The 60mm came out warmer, but the other three all hit these same white balance numbers. This would suggest that Fuji—or at least the X-T10—actually have their predefined white balances set with a very heavy green cast, and very slightly cool compared to industry standards. I must say, even when I first got my first Fuji camera—the X100S—and I didn't intend to use Fuji for serious work and didn't bother to test the colour properly, I always though the white balance, regardless of whether I picked a predefined one or left it on auto, always ran a little cold and so even for casual shooting, I left auto WB with +1 towards both yellow and red/magenta, and I tweaked the daylight and shade balances slightly warm, too. That was just by eye back then, but my recent testing of the X-T10's colour seems to suggest I was right to do so. edit: oh and if anyone wants further reading on the X-T10's colour, I've made a thread HERE.

^^ See, I'm lucky, I don't have that problem at all. My dog hates water

I can confirm that at least four of Top Gear's regular camera operators use Fuji cameras regularly, one of the producers in 2012 had a X100 with them at all times and most publicity stills from the various Top Gear trips of the last few years are taken on Fuji cameras. The X-E2 with the 14mm f/2.8 is especially popular with that crew. ... But they use Canon EOS C-series for video