Heipei

Early in 2015 I was ready for some­thing new cam­era-wise, so I started look­ing at Fu­ji­film X-se­ries in­ter­change­able lens cam­eras. The aim was not to re­place my X100 (no cam­era could ever do that), but merely to see whether a Fuji could po­ten­tially re­place my EOS 60D for trav­el­ling and na­ture pho­tog­ra­phy.

Fu­ji­film X-E1, Fu­ji­film XF 35 1.4 | 1/150sec, f/2.0, ISO 400

After a long pe­riod of re­search and de­lib­er­a­tion, I started look­ing for used cam­eras and quickly found a good offer: A sil­ver X-E1 with the great Fu­ji­film XF 35mm f1.4. I de­cided on the X-E1 be­cause of price and some neg­a­tive feed­back I had read about the X-Trans II sen­sor in later mod­els (X-E2, X-T1). Later in 2015, I got a Fu­ji­film X-T1 on loan for a few months, al­low­ing me to di­rectly com­pare the X-E1, X-T1, and X100. I don’t want to talk too much about tech­ni­cal dif­fer­ences be­tween these sys­tems, just the ones that I no­ticed and that im­pacted me.

X-E1: OVF, Shut­ter, Focus, But­tons

The first thing that im­me­di­ately struck me was the size of the X-E1: No mat­ter which lens, it would never be as com­pact as the X100. The X100 fits into my pocket for some of my jack­ets, the X-E1 al­most never does.

In terms of but­tons and menus, the X-E1 is a wel­come evo­lu­tion of the some­what awk­ward UI that the X100 started out with. The X-T1 re­tains the same menu lay­out. As far as but­tons and us­abil­ity is con­cerned, Fu­ji­film has stayed true to its of­ten-praised lay­out, with ded­i­cated hard­ware but­tons for im­por­tant things like shut­ter time, aper­ture, and ex­po­sure com­pen­sa­tion. No suprises here, all of these cam­eras han­dle amaz­ing which makes you want to take them with you wher­ever you go. My only gripe with the X-T1 is that it does not have a threaded re­lease but­ton.

Fu­ji­film X-E1, Fu­ji­film XF 35 1.4 | 1/100sec, f/1.4, ISO 200

Nei­ther the X-E1 nor the X-T1 has the same hy­brid viewfinder of the X100, and for me that’s OK. While the OVF might be nice for hard­core street pho­tog­ra­phers, I’ve rarely used it on the X100, usu­ally pre­fer­ring the ex­po­sure pre­view of the EVF. The EVF in the X-E1 is OK, but not re­ally any bet­ter than the X100. This is dif­fer­ent with the X-T1: Its viewfinder will knock your pants off! It’s huge, it’s bright, it ro­tates the dis­play, and it ac­tu­ally al­lows you to man­ual-fo­cus stuff with­out guess­ing (also thanks to var­i­ous fo­cus-as­sist fea­tures). This is the way I want to be using my cam­eras going for­ward.

The shut­ter in the X-E1 is out­right loud when com­pared to the silent leaf shut­ter of the X100. Hav­ing said that, it’s still not as loud as my DSLR. With the X-T1, you can choose be­tween an equally-loud me­chan­i­cal shut­ter or a com­pletely silent elec­tronic shut­ter. The elec­tronic shut­ter might cre­ate some ghost­ing ef­fects and other ar­ti­facts under some cir­cum­stances, but in gen­eral it works re­ally well. For me, being able to shoot in a church with not sound at all is a great fea­ture in it­self. If you focus man­u­ally you won’t even hear the chat­ter of the lens.

Both fotos: Fu­ji­film X-E1, Fu­ji­film XF 35 1.4

As far as auto-fo­cus is con­cerned there were no real sur­prises: I was shoot­ing with the XF 35mm 1.4 most of the time, one of the slow­est AF lenses from Fu­ji­film. Still, with the lat­est firmware up­grade, the X-T1 was able to drive the focus with a sur­pris­ing pace. Cer­tainly quick enough for all my needs. The X-E1 is no slouch ei­ther.

X-Trans vs. Bayer

A lot has been said about all of these cam­eras be­fore, and es­pe­cially with re­gards to very tech­ni­cal as­pects like AF speed, res­o­lu­tion, se­quen­tial cap­ture speed, bat­tery life. For me, none of this mat­ters that much with these kind of cam­eras, my EOS 60D is still able to beat the Fu­j­film cam­eras in any of these as­pects (sadly). What the Fu­ji­film cam­eras have going for them is the very nat­ural han­dling and their gor­geous color ren­di­tion.

Left: X-T1, Right: X-E1. Both: Fu­ji­film XF 35 1.4

What I didn’t re­ally re­al­ize until shoot­ing with the X-E1 and X-T1 was that they were ac­tu­ally using the Fu­ji­film X-Trans sen­sors. Ba­si­cally, these sen­sors are dif­fer­ent be­cause they have a dif­fer­ent color pat­tern than tra­di­tional Bayer sen­sors, such as the one in the X100. Now, I re­ally don’t care about the pat­tern of the sen­sor, even if it’s sup­posed to ren­der col­ors even truer to what the human eye is able to per­ceive. I do care how­ever if the sen­sor in­tro­duces prob­lems that haven’t been there be­fore.

There are a few things about the X-Trans sen­sors that I re­ally dis­like, and it all comes down to con­scious de­ci­sions made by Fu­ji­film. First off, the film em­u­la­tions ren­der dif­fer­ently, often with more con­trast and less dy­namic range. The most ob­vi­ous dif­fer­ence to the X100 is that they no longer ren­der as “warm” as my X100 did, which has ac­tu­ally been ob­served by a num­ber of peo­ple who traded their brand-new X100S/T back in for an old X100. But with some dif­fer­ent set­tings I can still work with the JPEGs that these cam­eras drop.

Fu­ji­film X-T1, Fu­ji­film XF 18-55 | 1/210sec, f/5.6, ISO 400

The biggest flaw is cer­tainly the ren­der­ing of skin tones at high ISOs by X-Trans II sen­sors. This is an issue that has been de­scribed in count­less fo­rums threads as “waxy” or “plas­tic” skin tones. Sadly, pho­tograph­ing peo­ple in dimly lit set­tings is some­thing I do quite often. The only rem­edy here is to shoot RAW and de­velop in Light­room, which pre­sents the next prob­lem: RAW sup­port for Fu­ji­film X-Trans files still sucks in Light­room. The files often come out look­ing like an im­pres­sion­ist paint­ing (see: “wa­ter­color ef­fect”), es­pe­cially with de­tails like fo­liage. Also I didn’t want to start de­vel­op­ing RAW with these cam­eras when JPEG al­ways worked fine for me. For now I shoot RAW+JPEG and usu­ally throw away the RAW files until the ef­fect is re­ally no­tice­able.

Fu­ji­film X-T1, Fu­ji­film XF 35 1.4 | 1/30sec, f/1.4, ISO 1250

Man­ual lenses

The cool thing about a mir­ror­less in­ter­change­able lens cam­era is that you can get all sorts of neat man­ual-fo­cus lenses from the days of full-frame SLR film pho­tog­ra­phy. There are plenty of cheap adapters avail­able. As far as the lenses go, you should do some re­search about good ones. These do not come dirt-cheap since every­one has re­al­ized the value of these old gems by now.

Fu­ji­film X-E1 with Canon nFD 50mm 1.4

I got my­self a Canon nFD 50mm 1.4 and a Canon nFD 24mm 2.8 from eBay. To­gether, these lenses cost me about €120, a lot less than any ex­per­i­ment with used Fu­ji­film lenses would have run me. To be fair, the 24mm is not a very sharp lens. It has to be stopped down be­fore you want to use the pic­tures it pro­duces. The 50mm 1.4 is a lot bet­ter: It has some is­sues wide open (slight CAs and gen­eral sharp­ness), but it pro­duces beau­ti­ful im­ages and still has a creamy bokeh when stopped down just slightly. While these are not the lenses I use every day, they are fun to shoot with as they force you to slow down and fur­ther com­ple­ment the whole rangefinder-like hands-on ex­pe­ri­ence with these cam­eras. When using man­ual focus lenses, the X-T1 is clearly su­pe­rior to the X-E1 be­cause of its huge EVF.

Fu­ji­film X-T1, Canon nFD 50 1.4 | 1/40sec, f/1.4, ISO 640

Ver­dict

In the past few months I had some time to dwell on the dif­fer­ences of these cam­eras. I’m now sure that nei­ther of these cam­eras can re­place one or the other un­equiv­o­cally. The X100 is unique be­cause of its size and per­fect sen­sor/lens combo. Fur­ther­more, the 23mm focal length of the X100 is per­fect in my opin­ion. It made me get a 24mm pan­cake lens for my EOS 60D and I was even con­sid­er­ing the XF 23mm 1.4 for the X-E1, stu­pid as that may sound. The X-E1 is the com­pro­mise of an X100 with in­ter­change­able lenses. The X-T1 is the ab­solutely bonkers work­horse in the line-up: fast, pro­fes­sional, solid. Still, it is not able to re­place a rangefinder-like cam­era such as the X-E1 for every­one. The fact that nei­ther cam­era can be rec­om­mended over the other is re­mark­able. With DSLRs, the “larger” mod­els are al­ways prefer­able save for price and maybe size.

Fu­ji­film X-E1, Canon nFD 24 2.8 | 1/140sec, f/x.x, ISO 400

For me, hav­ing three cam­eras (plus my DSLR) did not make it any eas­ier to find a ver­dict about which of these cam­eras might be my main cam­era. When I was in doubt I just took my X100 (mainly due to size), and it never dis­ap­pointed me. My ad­vice for some­one who wants to enter the Fuji X sys­tem would be this: Start out with one of the older mod­els. They can be had for fair prices and in terms of image qual­ity they are still on the same level (or even above) the newest mod­els. If you like the sys­tem but need things like a quick AF, you can al­ways keep your lenses and trade your body for a newer model.

While this re­view might sound slightly neg­a­tive, this is just me being pedan­tic. All of these is­sues I men­tioned are minor and quickly for­got­ten once you start using the cam­eras. The image qual­ity and color re­pro­duc­tion are amaz­ing, the lenses are tack-sharp and the cam­eras are a joy to shoot with. I’m not yet sell­ing my EOS 60D, but I find it in­creas­ingly hard to pick it up. The EVF and the man­ual han­dling re­ally im­proved my pho­tog­ra­phy and fre­quently make the dif­fer­ence be­tween mind­less snap­ping and con­scious pho­tog­ra­phy.