I was lucky to get hold of an XPro2 slightly ahead of the general UK release date. I was really keen to get one as I’d been holding out for one as my main camera and I have a wedding to shoot this weekend. I’ve read all the reviews, but I took most of them with a pinch of salt, as the people who wrote them are mostly X-Photographers. While I respect and admire a lot of them, at the end of the day, they get free gear from Fuji so of course they will be positive. However, I’m really happy with the camera, here are my first impressions based on a day of heavy shooting. This was a shoot for a mature model, who needed some shots for an agency. I used a combination of lenses, the 50-140, the 56mm 1.2, the 35mm f2 and the 90mm f2. All worked flawlessly.
1.It’s FAST, seriously fast. Everything feels quicker, from just navigating the menus to autofocus, taking shots, even with flash, just felt quicker. I used off camera flash for some of the shots on my shoot and it worked beautifully ( only for the indoor ones, the outdoor ones were natural light and a reflector ). This is the first X Series camera that has felt close to a DSLR in terms of general responsiveness. I’ve used my X-T1 heavily for 2 years, so I really noticed the difference. The speed I was able to fire off shots, even with the flash, but especially without it, was awesome. You can tell the processor has had a serious speed hike.
2.It’s built really well..obviously we’ll see in 6 months, but I already dropped it on concrete thanks to catching that stupid strap Fuji supplies with my hand as I turned around. The camera landed on its top, but other than a tiny dent, it was fine and I carried on with the shoot.
3.Ergonomically it has way more in common with the X100 series than the X-T1. It took me half an hour to get it working the way I wanted, the only thing I had any difficulty with was setting up the dual card slots, and even that was not too bad. (I did need to read the manual for that one )
4.AF speed..seemed very good, and a step in my opinion from the X-T1. The EVF is a joy to use and so smooth now, I used it in a dimly lit pub and it was just superb.
I’ve only tested AF-S and single point AF,as that is what I mostly use. I’ll test the continuous focus when I get a chance in a week or so.
5.Image quality – top notch as you would expect, I’ve not really tested super high ISOs but I did accidentally shoot a shot at ISO8000 this morning and it looked a lot better than the X-T1 would have. Anyone saying there is no ISO improvement must be smoking something good. In terms of real life use, the improvement is totally apparent to me, I don’t care about charts and pixel peeping, if I’m shooting in a dark pub or church with the XPro2 using the same lenses as the X-T1 I get better results, that’s all I care about.
6.Dynamic range – very good, I was able to pull back some nice detail from shadows and highlights, its easily as good as the X-T1 in that regard, hard to tell if better but I had no issues with the DR on the X-T1, I’ve always thought it was fine and I’ve been using that camera heavily since it first came out.
Here are some images from the shoot, all shot in raw and then converted to Astia in Lightroom..no other postprocessing bar a quick curves tweak in photoshop.
