I dealt O.K. with not having a camera most of the time. I kinda had to, as with the move and everthing, I simply couldn’t afford a new one. I carried my nikon, made a few pictures here and there, and mostly just waited. Then, there was another trip. I knew I wouldn’t be able to do a real trip with just my iphone, a film camera, and a few rolls of film, so I rented another camera, this time the Fuji XT-1. The first couple hours were a complete love-fest. It’s a great little camera, and I do mean little. Smaller than my Xpro by a smidge. The EVF, the main thing I was worried about, wasn’t laggy at all, it seemed, and fine enough to make compositions on. Signifigantly better than the EVF of the Xpro. Also, ergonomically, it’s a slam dunk. I was able to get it up and running in about five minutes of fiddling: turn off auto review, turn off beeping, turn on RAW, forget and then remember to turn off the focus assist light. After a little while, I set up the custom screen setting. There are half a dozen or so things I like to know at a glance; the battery level, the exposure setting and ISO, focus distance, exposure comp, stuff like that. No histograms. No gridlines. Anyway, I shot with the camera over a long weekend. Not enough to really live with it, but long enough to get a feel for it, anyway. When it came down to it, there really wasn’t enough difference for me to justify buying one over another Xpro. I liked it, but there wasn’t a signifigant difference in the things that mattered to me. First is shutter lag; they’re both excellent as long as you’re prefocused. Focus itself is a bit faster on the newer body, of course, but not fast enough to make a difference outside a sports stadium (and incidentally, the only long lens I own is manual). In low light, the XT was a bit better, maybe a stop, but it’s hard to say without doing a side by side test. The real killer is the viewfinder. Yes, the EVF is really good, better than any I’ve used so far. It still lags a little bit; optical viewfinders never do. Also, I really like the rangefinder style. You get a little more around the edges, yes, and there’s a bit of parralax error, but that helps. Somehow it makes visualization more real. More about the vacation in the next post, were there will be actual photos of hipsters in austin.
