Thursday, January 12, 2012

Fuji X10 – Review Part 31 – Bye Bye Birdy, a comment on the tripod mount, and some final thoughts.

Yes, the X10 has gone this afternoon to Toronto … and that’s the end of the shooting phase of the test series. There will be a few more articles trickling out based on archival images, but this is a done deal. Bummer … it’s an interesting puzzle.

One interesting aspect was how much came to light over the last 3 weeks or so with respect to RAW shooting. I will be able to perform some experiments with the F550 on RAW and RAW+JPG because the basic behaviors are very similar.

I had really wanted to document the wonky maximum shutter speeds … sheesh, every second partial stop sees the max shutter speed rise, regardless of ISO. What up wit’ dat? It really makes no sense to me at all, and is indicative of how little Fuji cares for some semblance of predictability in their exposures.


Here’s one issue that I have whinged over before … but here is a much clearer shot of it:

Note the position of the tripod mount … way over on the right side in this orientation. You have to shift the plate itself all the way to the left, else it does not sit flat because the little feet bumps are only a cm or so away from the tripod mounting hole … what a strange design.

Here, you can see that getting the tripod centered under the lens (for panoramas for example) requires you to shift the plate fully left and then clamp the camera with only part of the plate holding. This design just sucks.


Some Post-Review Thoughts

  • Very nice feel in the hand and shoots a lot like a dSLR as far as control goes
  • The case sucks in every possible way
  • I really like that it remembers the self timer from shot to shot but not across power cycles
  • I really hate that it remembers macro mode across power cycles … have engineering or marketing ever shot a camera for general purpose images?
  • I don’t like that images are overexposed in M size compared with L size … this is a serious PITA … you need to use compensation in M size to save highlights, and you should not have to
  • I like the performance at high ISO … it easily beats the F550 as it should
  • I like the L sized RAW performance at DR100 ISO100 … not perfect, but nice I mages can be crafted
  • My initial thoughts were that this camera was really fast shot to shot … well, it’s quite quick in jpeg but overall it is not quite as fast as I had thought … you still wait when shooting RAW
  • The flash does not rock my world … but the cam works really well with external flash
  • I hate the ORBs … they are always waiting to ruin an image …

I may add some more as I think of them.