The Xe-2 arrived on Friday and I’ve put it to serious use over the weekend. I used it at my sons football match, at a birthday party my 5 year old daughter attended, and then all day at a group fashion shoot in London. I’ll try and put my thoughts on each below, I’m only going to post pictures from the fashion shoot as I don’t have the permission of the parents of the other children to post images from the football match and the party.
The Football Match:
I often shoot these, the other parents love getting the images and it gives me something to do while standing out in the freezing cold watching my son run around. I normally use my D800 and a 70-200 2.8 zoom for this ( I have the sigma one, which performs very well ). I have tried using the Fuji Xe-1 and the 55-200mm lens before to shoot these matches. It’s fine, as long as they don’t move around! Usually I give up after 2 minutes and get the DSLR out. The Xe-2 was much, much better. Continuous AF I didn’t get on with still, I don’t really use it much normally and it just didn’t work for me at the match. What did work quite well was to put the camera on burst mode ( much improved over the XE-1 ), and use single target focussing ( the S setting on the fuji ). It’s now quick enough to focus that I got some decent shots so I was quite happy with how it performed. Would I use it instead of a DSLR? Of course not, for this kind of thing if I have the option I’d pick the DSLR every time, but the fuji did very well, and the 55-200mm is much faster with the XE-2.
The Kids Party:
This was pretty challenging. A dimly lit community hall, a bouncy castle, and a bunch of 5 year olds fuelled by cake and fizzy drinks running around like lunatics. I took the 18-55 lens for this one, as I wanted a bit more range than the 35mm 1.4 gives me ( normally that lens is welded to my camera ). I was very surprised how many good shots I got, the fuji did an excellent job and I really noticed the improved focussing speed. I think the low light focussing has been improved quite significantly. I tried a few tests at home as well and the Xe-2 didn’t hunt as much and was much faster to focus than the XE-1. It’s not perfect still but it’s much, much better.
The Fashion Shoot:
So I went on a group shoot on Sunday, at Beltcraft studios in London. This is a themed studio area, mostly natural light, and a really cool place. There were a bunch of models and a slightly larger bunch of photographers, as well as some great MUA’s and stylists. Mostly I used the fuji Xe-2 with the 35mm 1.4 and it was perfect for this kind of shoot. I did dig out the D800 for a few shots where I wanted to use a 200mm lens to compress the image a little, and I still love being able to shoot at 2.8 at 200mm. That ability, and the video capabilities, are my main reasons for hanging on to the D800. I did stuff the shoot up a little at the end, I left the shutter speed at 1/500 so a fair few of later images I shot are at 6400 iso. Here are a selection from the shoot , all shot straight to jpeg, on the Xe-2. They have been edited, I just stuck a few filters on, nothing special.
Thoughts on the camera:
I think the build quality has been improved , it feels better put together than my Xe-1, a lot of the dials are less easy to move accidentally and it just feels more solid. Of course, my Xe-1 might just have been put together on a Friday afternoon after the guys at Fuji had been out for lunch at the pub.
I like the new position of the AF button, and the wireless capability I can see being quite useful out on location, but it’s pretty clunky to use at the moment. I don’t want them to make it an always on wireless option constantly streaming images, as I think that would kill the battery life. Speaking of battery life, I got about 500 shots out of my Xe-2 on Sunday, which is pretty decent for such a small battery.
I didn’t have a problem with the removal of the view button, as the default options work well for me, but I can see how it would irritate some people. The EVF is much more responsive now and it is just a pleasure to use.
The big thing for me of course is the autofocus speed and I guess this is what Fuji must have been working on as a priority because they have really nailed it with this camera. Is it worth the upgrade? I guess it depends how much and where you use it. I use this camera all the time, in a variety of challenging situations, sometimes professionally, sometimes just for fun. For me even the incremental upgrades are worth it, and the improvement to the autofocus alone makes it worthwhile to me.