bhu

What uses are there from three megapixels between Sony's 43 Mpix and X-H2's 40 Mpix?
1. Cropping for lens quality?
2. Intellectual property gap?
3. Mosaic (X-trans) efficiency vs Bayer?
4. Adding 1.5 more Mpix of phase-detect elements or (O_O) time-of-flight array elements; pure fantasy, I know.

1. Integrate the "selfie" feature into the display's arm and limit its flexibility for people behind the camera or,
2. Create self-standing selfie monitors between 50 mm and 300 mm diagonal that plug into the video port, run off their own batteries and show all of the camera info and live image as if it were a viewfinder. People can use a remote or phone application to control the camera when facing it.

It is the internal orientation sensor(s); not sure how many Ther are if there is more than one.
Treat the camera like a phone and watch how you handle it. Your camera's sensor may be slightly off in how it calibrates orientation. Although it is not a solution, you may get better results starting it from level and sneaking up on where you want to hold it or giving it a gentle shake at level.

"Shadow" settings adjust gamma near the dark end of the luminance range. This is typically used to artificially increase luminance in low-luminance areas so you can see more detail in dark areas when the image is reproduced. Shadow enhancement can be applied to any photograph, even photo's taken with "DR" enhancement. Those settings usually just re-map gray levels. For example, gray levels 1, 2, and 3 may be re-mapped to gray levels 2, 4, and 6 making them artificially brighter.
 
Dynamic range is supposed to be an increase in the sensor's range of counting photons. That is, if a pixel element in the sensor needs 10, or more, photons to be not-black and 10,000, or fewer, photons to be not-white (saturated), the dynamic range is 1000:1. Now, say that some new sensor may be able to read only 5 photons for not-black and can accept 50,000 photons for not-white resulting in 10,000:1 dynamic range. True dynamic range is a function of the photo-receptors on the camera's sensor.
 
Please note that dynamic range has nothing to do with bit-depth - the number of gray levels. Bit-depth simply divides the sensor's operating range of detectable luminance into gray levels. A sensor with 1,000,000:1 dynamic range can have an 8-bit per color conversion or a 14-bit per color conversion but you should expect the 8-bit to show gradations, or lines, where the photon count breaches the next gray level. Spacial dithering can help smooth "chunky" gray levels but the best way is, obviously, to add more bit-depth, which divides the sensor's luminance range into finer and finer slices.
 
There are ways of fudging this, though, so beware of the difference between true dynamic range and "features" that call themselves Dynamic Range, or DR. Fujifilm has been adjusting gain in pixel elements so that, even if the element's range is small, the range can be moved, shifted, so that some elements are "tuned" to be more sensitive and some are "tuned" to be less. This technique effectively increases a picture's dynamic range at the cost of... spacial dithering; that is, half the pixels scattered throughout the image may be exposed more, leading to blooming in bright areas just to capture detail in dark areas, while the other pixels might be less exposed to preserve detail in bright areas at the cost of losing detail in shadows.
 
Using a DR setting sprinkles darker pixels in with brighter ones to (theoretically) increase the dynamic range of the picture (but not individual pixel elements). (I said, "theoretically," because the increased dynamic range must be saved in the picture, then reproduced on some media capable of showing it.) There is nothing inherently wrong with this approach and it can actually aid in giving a photo film-like grain.\
 
Of course, there is another way to increase dynamic range: Take two photographs with different exposure settings and overlay them. That is the common "HDR" stuff you read about. Typical HDR photography increases dynamic range by using temporal dithering (in a very simplistic sense).
 
Shadow enhancement can be applied to any photograph, even photo's taken with "DR" enhancement. Those settings usually just re-map gray levels. For example, gray levels 1, 2, and 3 may be re-mapped to gray levels 2, 4, and 6 making them artificially brighter.

The sony pancake power zoom 16-50 kit lens is 30mm (selp1650) 
 
the xf18-55 is 70.4mm (at 18mm)
the xc16-50 is 65.2mm (at 16mm)
 
so being 10-20mm shorter shouldn't be a problem for Fuji, as it is an XC lens it will probably be an F/3.5 - 5.6 like the current XC16-50
 
at least in the uk Fujifilm currently has 3 options on the XT20 and XE3 (only the XT is shipped with the XC as an option)
 
Body only (£849.00) (both cameras)
XT20 With XF18-55 (£1149.00)
XE3 With XF18-55 (£1249.00)
Then things change the XT20 is also offered with the XC16-50 (£949.00)
The XE3 is offered with XF23mm F/2 (£1149.00)
 
Not sure why the XF18-55 is £100 more on an XE3, as body price is the same, only reason I can think of is the XF18-55 list price is significantly higher than the XF23 f/2. but still sees to make the XT a better purchase if you wanted the XF18-55

Seeing this, I am wondering: couldn't one take an external battery, say a 26800mAh one, and connect it through usb to power the camera during shooting?
 
Of course, this is not a proper solution if you regularly need long battery life, but maybe it could be a good stopgap measure - it should, roughly, last at least as long as about 10 of the internal batteries.

"Shadow" settings adjust gamma near the dark end of the luminance range. This is typically used to artificially increase luminance in low-luminance areas so you can see more detail in dark areas when the image is reproduced. Shadow enhancement can be applied to any photograph, even photo's taken with "DR" enhancement. Those settings usually just re-map gray levels. For example, gray levels 1, 2, and 3 may be re-mapped to gray levels 2, 4, and 6 making them artificially brighter.
 
Dynamic range is supposed to be an increase in the sensor's range of counting photons. That is, if a pixel element in the sensor needs 10, or more, photons to be not-black and 10,000, or fewer, photons to be not-white (saturated), the dynamic range is 1000:1. Now, say that some new sensor may be able to read only 5 photons for not-black and can accept 50,000 photons for not-white resulting in 10,000:1 dynamic range. True dynamic range is a function of the photo-receptors on the camera's sensor.
 
Please note that dynamic range has nothing to do with bit-depth - the number of gray levels. Bit-depth simply divides the sensor's operating range of detectable luminance into gray levels. A sensor with 1,000,000:1 dynamic range can have an 8-bit per color conversion or a 14-bit per color conversion but you should expect the 8-bit to show gradations, or lines, where the photon count breaches the next gray level. Spacial dithering can help smooth "chunky" gray levels but the best way is, obviously, to add more bit-depth, which divides the sensor's luminance range into finer and finer slices.
 
There are ways of fudging this, though, so beware of the difference between true dynamic range and "features" that call themselves Dynamic Range, or DR. Fujifilm has been adjusting gain in pixel elements so that, even if the element's range is small, the range can be moved, shifted, so that some elements are "tuned" to be more sensitive and some are "tuned" to be less. This technique effectively increases a picture's dynamic range at the cost of... spacial dithering; that is, half the pixels scattered throughout the image may be exposed more, leading to blooming in bright areas just to capture detail in dark areas, while the other pixels might be less exposed to preserve detail in bright areas at the cost of losing detail in shadows.
 
Using a DR setting sprinkles darker pixels in with brighter ones to (theoretically) increase the dynamic range of the picture (but not individual pixel elements). (I said, "theoretically," because the increased dynamic range must be saved in the picture, then reproduced on some media capable of showing it.) There is nothing inherently wrong with this approach and it can actually aid in giving a photo film-like grain.\
 
Of course, there is another way to increase dynamic range: Take two photographs with different exposure settings and overlay them. That is the common "HDR" stuff you read about. Typical HDR photography increases dynamic range by using temporal dithering (in a very simplistic sense).
 
Shadow enhancement can be applied to any photograph, even photo's taken with "DR" enhancement. Those settings usually just re-map gray levels. For example, gray levels 1, 2, and 3 may be re-mapped to gray levels 2, 4, and 6 making them artificially brighter.

"Shadow" settings adjust gamma near the dark end of the luminance range. This is typically used to artificially increase luminance in low-luminance areas so you can see more detail in dark areas when the image is reproduced. Shadow enhancement can be applied to any photograph, even photo's taken with "DR" enhancement. Those settings usually just re-map gray levels. For example, gray levels 1, 2, and 3 may be re-mapped to gray levels 2, 4, and 6 making them artificially brighter.
 
Dynamic range is supposed to be an increase in the sensor's range of counting photons. That is, if a pixel element in the sensor needs 10, or more, photons to be not-black and 10,000, or fewer, photons to be not-white (saturated), the dynamic range is 1000:1. Now, say that some new sensor may be able to read only 5 photons for not-black and can accept 50,000 photons for not-white resulting in 10,000:1 dynamic range. True dynamic range is a function of the photo-receptors on the camera's sensor.
 
Please note that dynamic range has nothing to do with bit-depth - the number of gray levels. Bit-depth simply divides the sensor's operating range of detectable luminance into gray levels. A sensor with 1,000,000:1 dynamic range can have an 8-bit per color conversion or a 14-bit per color conversion but you should expect the 8-bit to show gradations, or lines, where the photon count breaches the next gray level. Spacial dithering can help smooth "chunky" gray levels but the best way is, obviously, to add more bit-depth, which divides the sensor's luminance range into finer and finer slices.
 
There are ways of fudging this, though, so beware of the difference between true dynamic range and "features" that call themselves Dynamic Range, or DR. Fujifilm has been adjusting gain in pixel elements so that, even if the element's range is small, the range can be moved, shifted, so that some elements are "tuned" to be more sensitive and some are "tuned" to be less. This technique effectively increases a picture's dynamic range at the cost of... spacial dithering; that is, half the pixels scattered throughout the image may be exposed more, leading to blooming in bright areas just to capture detail in dark areas, while the other pixels might be less exposed to preserve detail in bright areas at the cost of losing detail in shadows.
 
Using a DR setting sprinkles darker pixels in with brighter ones to (theoretically) increase the dynamic range of the picture (but not individual pixel elements). (I said, "theoretically," because the increased dynamic range must be saved in the picture, then reproduced on some media capable of showing it.) There is nothing inherently wrong with this approach and it can actually aid in giving a photo film-like grain.\
 
Of course, there is another way to increase dynamic range: Take two photographs with different exposure settings and overlay them. That is the common "HDR" stuff you read about. Typical HDR photography increases dynamic range by using temporal dithering (in a very simplistic sense).
 
Shadow enhancement can be applied to any photograph, even photo's taken with "DR" enhancement. Those settings usually just re-map gray levels. For example, gray levels 1, 2, and 3 may be re-mapped to gray levels 2, 4, and 6 making them artificially brighter.

Patrick's blog this morning about competition, survival of the fittest, and should also consider government and other social "interference" in pure price/performance competition.
 
The United States' government brokered deals between GM, creditors, and labor to preserve jobs. US private banks had bad debt purchased by the government, too. This is the USA where competition is more free-market than a great many other countries.
 
Japan's government has a long history of interfering when struggling companies are at risk of either adding to unemployment or losing world market share in a favored industry.  The government will often aid in negotiating a merger, acquisition, or, if there is no other recourse, purchase the failing division from one or more companies and set up a government-run holding company.
 
Preventing large lay-offs and losing market share to another country are not the only types of interference with natural selection. Also, do not think for a moment Japan is the only country actively supporting favored companies or industries. Every developed country does this. The USA is one of the least interfering governments in its economy so companies often do go out of business and people think the government is passive. Most other countries offer more support to prevent job loss. Similarly, countries often offer massive support to industries they want to protect. Tariffs on imports, land grants, infrastructure (utilities and transportation), and even direct investment. In fact, I seem to remember a recent example in China where the government paid 3/4 the cost of building a new multi-billion USD factory. Developing and protecting key industries, whether agricultural or electronic, for jobs, national trade strategy, or reduced dependency on other nations happens all over the world more frequently than most people imagine.
 
Thus, a rumor that the Japanese government is investigating solutions to Nikon's problems, such as folding all, or part, of the company into Fujifilm, should be no surprise. Nikon is a large manufacturer with well-known branding and thousands of employees. If faced with insolvency, rather than face the horrors of closing multiple factories and offices, brokering merger into a well-performing peer may mean some jobs become redundant but that is better than losing all of them.
 
I have even seen the government collect money-losing divisions from several companies under joint leadership. The divisions are all spun off from their parents and reorganized, much like the US government purchasing bad debt.

The big take-away, for me, is Fujifilm appears to be committing itself to long-term X-system video. 

Pixel = picture element = group of sensor elements that, together, comprise the necessary information to reproduce any color the elements are capable of recording or displaying for the smallest solid angle. Individual color elements do not have to be the same size, either. OLED panels often use much larger blue elements than red or green to keep the drive voltage down and reduce burn-in while delivering the same amount of light as a smaller blue element driven "harder", but I digress. OLEDs are not used for sensors in any meaningful way.
 
Mosaic = repeating arrangement of picture elements (pixels). A mosaic may be as simple as a pixel like RGB-stripe, may be slightly more complex such as GR,BG (Bayer) where there are two green elements, or a bit more complex GBG,RGR,GBG in tiles that alternate between 0 and 90 degree rotation (portrait and landscape, if you will) so that it takes 4 sets of these 3x3 tiles to define the basic mosaic. X-trans is a 6x6 arrangement (mosaic) of 3x3 pixels alternating in orientation as if you are laying a patterned tile and turn every other one 90 degrees. 
 
X-trans is, arguably, a modified version of Bayer. The pattern is more complex but there are still twice as many green elements as red and blue and those green elements have some bias toward horizontal and diagonal lines but the pattern was "softened" by making quads of green elements.
 
Moire is still possible on X-trans but will be less apparent due to the disruption in the green elements' pattern. Moire comes from capturing and image with a pattern that largely aligns with the sensor's pattern, or a pattern on the media it is reproduced on like a computer monitor or electronic printer.
 
For more information, look up moire in Wikipedia and then modulation transfer function.

You sound interested in a zoom. The 16-55 is a "Pro" lens like the 50-140 with its constant aperture zoom made for photographers who use a lot of manual settings. Get it, if you need that feature. Keep in mind it is the constant aperture zoom and probably faster auto-focus components that make the lens so hefty.
 
Do you have the 18-55 kit zoom? It is optically slower than the 16-55 at anything but 18 mm but also weighs under half and is smaller, especially zoomed to 55 mm. If you have the kit lens, think over what you would like it to do that it does not right now. If you do not have it, or another zoom, consider trades between the 10-24, 16-50, 16-55, 18-55, and 18-135. I do not recall any truly "bad" lens reviews for Fujifilm lenses. Whatever you decide should not become a horror story.
 
Regarding primes, I only really use fast primes wide open in poor light, though professional photographers do so to intentionally de-focus some of the image. (The wider the aperture setting, the shallower the depth of field, meaning foreground and background become more out of focus as aperture increases. Etendue can be frustratingly intractable but at least photographers seem to have fun with it.)
 
If you have not seen it, yet, look this over:
http://www.fujivsfuji.com/16-55mm-f2pt8-vs-18-55mm-f2pt8-4-vs-18-135mm-f3pt5-5pt6/

For astro-photography, look for reviews with measurements of chromatic aberration.
 
Photographing point light sources with numerical apertures that are close to zero using a lens with significant chromatic aberration will turn stars into rainbows with the worst of it in the corners. Any part of the photograph with enough chromatic aberration change a star's shape is garbage you will want to trim off, anyway, so a very wide lens can actually result in a smaller field of view after chopping off the bad areas. Look for the widest angle on a lens that does not show chromatic aberration.
 
If you can adjust for distortion and vignetting, you might try stitching images together. Image warping and adjusting luminance is workable but fixing chromatic aberrations is more challenging.

Replace flash with small OLED display facing upward for head-down viewing instead of consuming more mass and volume on a tilt screen. Add a sensor above the rangefinder to toggle the OLED on as long as a finger is .
 
Focus point selection on the rear touch screen display shows focus points on both the EVF and upward-facing OLED when they are active.
 
Enlarge the EVF exit pupil, if possible while keeping costs reasonable. Keep the optical (focus) correction dial and the eye sensor.
 
No preference on WR

http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/atclen/news_en/15mk/020400354/

http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/atclen/news_en/15mk/020400354/

Your 23 for low light or action shots and the 18-135 for multi-purpose and wide zoom range when you have good lighting, which should be most of the day on a bicycle. If you want portability and only 2 lenses, these are the two I would take for an almost entirely outdoor holiday. Another option is to use an XF18 pancake in place of the 23 but then you might consider just using a cell phone for quick, informal shots and keep the faster XF23.

For a long zoom like this, I would like it fast with OIS without making it overly bulky and heavy. That should be easy enough