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Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
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I was intrigued to discuss the X100V with my colleague Carey as he wrote his initial impressions. Intrigued because, while I completely understand his perspective and recognize the things he likes about the new camera, I found myself having the opposite impression.
We’ve both owned original X100s (though with its somewhat Germanic styling, I think of it as the Ur-X100, rather than the O.G), and we both love the look, the feel and the pictures they produce.
I completely agree with him about the appeal of the tilting rear screen. I was never part of the faction clamoring for one but it’s something I felt was missing on the wide-angle Panasonic LX100 II, so I’m certainly not against it being added.
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| If you’re going to try to satisfy a group that screaming for a touchscreen and another being equally adamant that ‘an X100 has to have a fixed screen’ then this is the way to do it: with a piece of engineering that means you can ignore it if you prefer |
Likewise the touchscreen. I think the joystick that appeared with the X100F did everything I might want to achieve with a touchscreen, but I’m not put-out at all that Fujifilm’s added one. Sure, I find its behavior a little annoying (or perhaps just unfamiliar: it’s early days, after all), but I can always turn it off, if I don’t get used to it.
Two things that irked me about the X-Pro3 have been directly carried over: the loss of infinity focus indication in the optical viewfinder that’s really hard to work around, if you’re an existing X100 user, and the almost-very-good Face/Eye detection implementation.
As I detailed in the X-Pro3 review: the camera’s Face/Eye detection mode arguably works best in ‘Face Selection’ mode: letting you select the face you want it to focus on, but making it quick and easy to drop back to single AF point mode. The only downside being that you have to re-engage Face Selection every time you turn the camera on, and there’s no menu option for it, so it has to tie-up one of the camera’s function buttons.
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| I’ve never been a fan of Fujifilm’s combined ISO/Shutter Speed dial, but having it click into the ‘up’ (ISO) position and adding subtle detents so you can feel how much you’ve rotated it is a subtle but significant improvement. It makes it much more usable when you’ve got the camera to your eye. |
It’s this, rather than the loss of function buttons that comes from the deletion of the four-way controller, that struck me. Even without using the swipes on the touchscreen I found I had plenty of ways to get direct access to the things I want.
Ultimately, both these things could be fixed with firmware, if Fujifilm believe enough people agree with me.
Ultimately, I think my glass half full perspective comes because this is the first redesign of the lens in nearly ten years, and it hasn’t addressed the thing I care about most. And any improvements not made in the X100V won’t now be addressed for the foreseeable future.
Any improvements not made in the X100V won’t now be addressed for the foreseeable future
Above all, the thing preventing me upgrading my X100 was focus responsiveness. With the important caveat that this is a pre-production unit, my impression is that the X100V’s autofocus isn’t significantly faster than the F’s. And, for the shooting I do, and the shooting I imagine myself doing (isn’t the X100 romance partly about the photographer you imagine yourself becoming?), I would really welcome something a little more snappy.
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| The Mark II lens is the same dimensions as the old one and maintains compatibility with existing accessories. But for my own use, it doesn’t address my biggest hang-up about the previous design. |
All the early signs point to Fujifilm living up to its promises of sharper corners and better close-focus performance. Which are things I know a lot of X100 users wanted to see fixed. But they never really mattered to me. Like the flip-up screen or touch-capability they were more ‘nice to haves’ rather than essentials. Faster focus, to me, felt necessary.
I’d personally be disappointed if it turned out they’ve tied their hands when designing the new lens, in order to maintain backwards compatibility with adaptors I don’t have
My suspicion is that this, along with the need to mount a filter on an adaptor to get complete sealing, is a side-effect of trying to make sure the existing wide- and tele- conversion lenses remained compatible. This will no-doubt come as welcome news to people who had bought these accessories.
I’d personally be disappointed if it turned out they’ve tied their hands when designing the new lens, in order to maintain backwards compatibility with adaptors I don’t have (and don’t want: if I wanted a 28mm equiv. camera, I’d buy a Ricoh GR, rather than trying to mod an X100 into one). And personally is the key word in all of this.
It’s true that I’m a little more glass half full than Carey is, but I do recognize that there’s a delicious-looking half pint sitting in front of me. Every previous version of the X100 has included a series of small but significant improvements. They haven’t necessarily been compelling enough to prompt an upgrade version-to-version, but each has been better than the last. Even with my downbeat view, the X100V appears to comfortably reach that bar.
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| The X100V adds a tilt screen and touch-sensitivity in a way that shouldn’t alienate existing users, which is a delicate tightrope for Fujifilm to walk. |
More than that, it appears Fujifilm has found a way of addressing both the ‘no tilt-screen, no buy’ crowd and, perhaps, the ‘add weather sealing, then we’ll talk,’ brigade. And has found a way of doing so without alienating the existing audience.
And therein is a hint at the challenge they faced: how do you push forward a series of cameras that so many people already feel personally invested in?
As me and Carey’s differing perspectives show: even that existing group isn’t homogenous. The X100 series has a surprisingly diverse user base, each of whom wants Fujifilm’s next iteration to be their perfect camera. So perhaps it’s forgivable, even if it transpires that the X100V isn’t mine.
Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
In this week’s episode, Chris is joined by our Science Editor Rishi Sanyal to take a closer look at some of the new photography features on the iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro camera. Find out how some of the headline features like Night Mode perform, and learn about less-publicized photo features like the handy ‘Capture Outside of the Frame.’ With the Pixel 4 on the horizon, it’s just the beginning of more head-to-head comparisons of these powerful little cameras.
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Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
By now you’ve seen plenty of information about Panasonic’s new S-series cameras, but after shooting with them at Panasonic’s launch event in Barcelona, Chris and Jordan tell us about some important things you might have overlooked from the spec sheet.
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Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
It’s been a busy few weeks around the DPReview office. Alongside full-length reviews, we’ve been busy making sure our camera roundups are up to date as well as preparing seasonal content like our holiday gift guides. We know you’ve been busy too, and you might have missed some of the most recent additions to our studio test scene. Read more
Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
Adobe announced the availability of Lightroom 5 Beta at Adobe Labs today and by all means, go grab a free copy and play. I’ve been using Lightroom since version 1 and have been impressed with every upgrading to the program, gladly plopping down my money for a new version as I have found the enhancements in subsequent revisions well worth the funds. And Lightroom 5 seems to be on the same track, based on my findings while playing with the beta this last week.
Adobe has a number of fine new features in this revision and they are sure not to be missed. They include
That’s the obvious stuff that Abode packs into their press kit and you probably have seen those items demonstrated on other sites. What I want to show you are three things I found to be helpful in little, but repetitive ways for how I use Lightroom.
(Click any image for a larger version)
Thank you! I’ve been wanting this feature for the longest time to save time. But it’s not quite right.
Invert Mask is currently only available with the new Radial Gradient feature. See it at the right? It works well and I’d like to see if appear in the Gradient Tool (especially when creating a new gradient…it would be great to great one just the opposite of the one I am using at the moment) and in the Adjustment Brush.
Here’s a simple rundown of how the tool works.
Starting with this image of one of my client’s boats, the Un-Cruise Adventures Safari Explorer off the shore of Maui, Hawaii, I want to see which direction works best: highlight the boat and darken the surrounding seas or slightly darken the boat and bring up the seas, in order to add contrast to the main subject.
I select the new Radial Gradient tool and draw an oval over the boat (Dear Adobe, please make this tool work like the Ellipse Tool in Photoshop for consistency. Specifically, please allow me to grab a “corner” of the ellipse and drag it down instead of starting with the middle of the ellipse. Consistency would really help. Thanks.).
Because I have chosen only to increase the exposure by .39, Lightroom masked the boat and increased the exposure for the rest of the image. But if I want to swap that and mask the entire picture except for the boat, it’s just a simple click of the “Invert Mask” check box.
Subtle, but useful to me.
Now please, Adobe, add that ability to the Gradient Tool and to the Adjustment Brush especially.
I’d like to think my sensor was perfectly clean before leading a recent tour to Bhutan. As a matter of fact, it was extremely clean before I left. But, as life goes, things don’t stay clean.
Take this image of a masked dancer at the Paro Tsechu.
I wanted some blur (obviously) and used a small aperture to achieve a slow shutter speed. In this case, f/25 and 1/6th of a second. Closing down that aperture makes dust on the sensor more obvious, but this image has a lot going on making it hard to find all the dust.
If I click on the “Visualize Spots” check box after clicking the Spot Removal Tool, the slider to the right of it comes alive and I can now more easily see spots. This is a technique used in Photoshop for a while and it works best where edge contrast can be spotted, so in areas without a lot going on.
In this image, I found three additional spots, two of which would have been easy to miss without the tool.
This one is really small, but helpful. With the addition of the “Upright” feature to the Lens Correction panel, Adobe made it easier to get to the Chromatic Aberration removal check box.
It’s a small thing, but I often use the check box for “Enable Profile Corrections” for my lens and then want to remove chromatic aberration on only select images, but many. The placement of the box here, as well as on the “Color” tab, helps.
Maybe I’m doing something wrong, but I doubt it. This is one of Adobe’s touted JDI (Just Do It) features and it seems to work well on the demos, but not in real life. If it did, it would be cool. I can get the feature to work part of the time, but no where near even 25% of the time reliably.
The feature is supposed to level a scene and make diverging or converging vertical lines straight. It can be helpful when it works. But something as simple as a horizon, an obvious one, in this example is not being leveled. Here’s the initial image out of the camera.
Now to show that the horizon is not level using the Crop Overlay.
And now using the tool in Auto mode.
I tried in Level and Full modes to no avail. The program clearly states “No Upright Correction Found”. This is supposed to be a boon for landscape photographers, but even with a clear horizon like this, it failed.
I tried another obvious shot from Bhutan.
Now how can it say, in all four modes (Auto, Level, Vertical and Full) that no data can be found?
I’m not saying it doesn’t work, I’m saying it’s wonky and not yet reliable.
But this is beta software and that is why they put it out, to find the kinks that mean the most for their users.
Give it a try, Lightroom 5 Beta is quite useful with all the upgrades instituted.
Post originally from: Digital Photography Tips.
Check out our more Photography Tips at Photography Tips for Beginners, Portrait Photography Tips and Wedding Photography Tips.
3 Small But Important Lightroom 5 Beta Changes You Might Have Missed
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