A Few More Thoughts on the X-T1

D300, 70-300G VR

The image in the last post has hit Explore on Flickr, always a nice bit of recognition.

I'm up to 150 shots on the X-T1 so far, mostly on my walks to and from work. 130 of that has been with the XC 16-50 OIS II.

I'm really digging the dial UI. It does leave the X-T1 with a bit of a split personality in terms of shooting with gloves on. As long as you are interacting with controls on a physical dial, the X-T1 is an outstanding gloves body, surprisingly so for its size. That covers Shutter release, shutter speed, Exposure compensation, ISO, metering, AF mode & drive mode, as well as Aperture with a manual or XF series lens. The control wheels and buttons are the opposite story, they're pretty buried and the buttons are basically unusable with larger gloves. Due to weather I've not really had much experience with gloves off, but the X-T1 is definitely the best camera in its size class that I've shot with for gloves on, I'd have to move up to a D300-size body to get better gloved handling. Note in comparison to the A7II, the X-T1 is definitely better as long as I'm just interacting with the core controls. Both are equally bad in terms of little fiddly buttons both suck, the A7II was a touch better though due to a bit better rear button layout.

One issue I've been having is that I keep hitting the metering switch when changing shutter speeds (I've been using Manual exposure with Auto-ISO as my AE mode, as that reduces the need to tweak auto-ISO settings). It's a touch annoying, but acceptable.

Back Button AF is a real miss here though. Fuji does have the ability to BBAF in a pre-defined mode from Manual Focus mode, but when in S or C, I cannot decouple the AF from the shutter. Normally this would be an issue for me, but given the small, somewhat hard to find AF-L & AE-L buttons (one of which becomes AF-On), it's a mixed blessing, as there's no easy to find by feel BBAF button. I understand things have evolved some on newer bodies (this is a 5 year old body and Fuji's first SLR-style body with any real action shooting capability).

Focus assist in manual focus mode is a little weird. Peaking works right up until you half-press the shutter. I need to get out of the habit of half-pressing the shutter constantly when working with manual focus. The Focus Assist button does magnification, and is well located. Only caveat is MF lenses need the camera to be set to M mode for things to work correctly, you can't just throw them on in S or C mode. The same mostly goes for XC & XF lenses. Will definitely take some getting used to.