Last week for my name day I received a new camera, a Fuji X-A1. I am moving up from my old Canon SX30, and the difference in sensor size is mind blowing.There are several areas I am looking at primarily when using/judging a camera, and here they are, after just one weekend of playing with my new toy:
- low light shooting: I took some pictures in my basement, lights off, no flash, moving the ISO from 800 to 6400. I have to say the quality is amazing, and no hand shaking either. The image looks great even when it is taken against the window, so the natural light comes from behind the subject. Also, another picture with the subject facing at 90 degrees from the window, with natural light on one side and artificial (LED soft white 3000K light bulbs) light on the other, the camera still manages very well.
- speedy subjects in good sunlight, outside in the backyard, really nice colours and no movement blur, the camera was able to open up and go really fast, so no blur.
- video: this is a much sadder reality, video is not quite that much better, the AF in video is just as awful as before, at least in any scenes other than strong sunlight with lots of contrast. Not realy great. I am not that interested in video, but still...
Coming from a big zoom point and shoot, I have to say I mostly used AUTO, so I am sure even better results can be obtained with a bit of manual control. I definitely want to explore manual focus.
It is interesting with a 3x zoom lens, coming from a 35x zoom, I thought I'd surely miss the long side of the lens, but it was not so. The AF performance in the Canon made the long zoom (pretty much anything above 125mm equivalent) pretty useless in anything but the strongest sunlight. Plus the manual focus is completely unusable in the Canon. So I don't think I took more than 100 pictures at long zooms in 5 years. Actually, I would rather get a prime lens at around 40 or 50 mm equivalent and make this camera even more portable, I don't think I'd miss the zoom.
