Fuji X-Pro1 – Initial Thoughts

Hey All,

I’ve been lucky enough to be given a Fuji X-Pro1 by Leigh Diprose for the last few days to give it a road test and see what I can do with it. I was heading away for the weekend already, so I took the X-Pro1 on a bit of a road trip around the south of Western Australia. My very initial impressions of the Fuji X-Pro1 is that it has an exceptional build quality, the camera is quite nice to hold even with my large hands, many of the smaller cameras seem to get lost in my hands. The controls are all fairly intuitive and very accessible, with in minutes of picking it up I was able to use most of the functions I would normally use on my dSLR.

First stop was about 3 hours drive out of Perth, I’m a sucker for clear night skies, we are lucky enough to have very little light pollution here in the west. I decided to give the Fuji a go at some star photography, normally I’d photograph this with my dSLR as it has quite good high-ISO performance.

This image was photographed at ISO1600, f2.8 and a 30 second exposure. The camera was in single shot mode and this is a RAW image with minimal processing. Within the first 3 images I was incredibly impressed by the high ISO performance, there isn’t a huge amount of noise in this image and the clarity in the RAW image is exceptional. The straight jpeg was very similar to this RAW file that I’ve just added some sharpening to.

ISO1600, f2.0, 1/4000. This is a straight jpeg out of the camera with no adjustments, I’ve just resized it and added my signature. The noise levels are very acceptable, I’d have no issues printing this image fairly large. I’m very impressed with the dynamic range of the sensor too.

One of the more interesting modes I found for shooting was the automatic panoramic mode, you set the camera at your start point, press the shutter and sweep the camera from left to right, it then takes a series of images and stitches them together.

This is a slightly adjusted panoramic image, photographed with the Fuji X-Pro1 in panoramic mode. f4.0, ISO400, 1/220 the final full sized image is 5120 x 1440 px, so definitely a printable size.

This was photographed at: f8, 1/1500 and ISO800. I’ve done some processing in Adobe Camera RAW, the files are very flexible and retain a lot of detail.

A RAW image with some minor tweaks in Camera RAW.

Overall I’m very impressed with the camera, I think it would make the perfect travel camera for someone who is accustomed to having professional level gear with them, but doesn’t want to have to carry it all over the world! This camera is definitely aimed at the enthusiast / semi-pro photographer, it has more than enough manual functions to keep any photographer happy, while retaining enough automatic modes to make it easy enough for the beginner to use. The files it’s 16mp sensor produces are very clean and very ready to print!

I have the camera for a few more days so I’m going to be trying out a few more seascape type images and a few other subjects. I’m definitely going to look into getting one, I’d really like to take one with me to Cambodia in September, I think it would be the ideal camera for the photo-journalist / documentary and street photographer.

Regards

Paul Pichugin