Fujifilm X-E2 Camera - Silver (16.MP, CMOS II Sensor)

Product Information

I have also mainly used aperture priority with exposure compensation for around the last 30 years and not many pictures get away. You can set the aperture and shutter speed before recording begins, but not during, and you can also set the Film Simulation m As I've mentioned before, Fujifilm are to be commended for their comprehensive and feature adding firmware updates. If you're in the middle of a long exposure in the Auto or timed manual modes, turning off the camera won't stop it — the X-E2 will dutifully keep on with its long exposure until it's done! Unless shooting indoors in mixed artificial light (or, strangely enough, into the light and exposing for shadows), I am quite good at estimating roughly correct exposure so long as I always see the scene as it is and concentrate on the areas that I want to be exposed correctly.

Unlike most of the disposable plastic (but expensive) cameras I review today, the X-E2 is a real camera: all-metal with engraved markings, and so are its lenses. X-E2 was the first digital camera with a split prism manual focus mode, which is the best digital simulation for an optical rangefinder focusing system out there. This results in slightly noisier operation and a much slower flash-sync speed of 1/180th second (versus the X100's 1/400th second). It is especially true if I have some point of reference, say an image I took previously under different light levels.

Harking back to film cameras of the past, this displays dual images on the left and right which then need to be lined up together for accurate manual focusing, enabling accurate focusing especially when shooting wide-open or for macro shooting. The EVF wasn’t, however, without fault; it has a proximity sensor which it uses to switch it on and off (depending on camera config) and I just felt there were a few too many times where it wouldn’t turn on when I needed it to if my face wasn’t pressed right up against it.

The LCD screen has a handy Info view which presents all of the key settings at once, or you can switch to the Standard or Custom Live View modes, with the latter offering 14 customisable options (these are also used for the electronic viewfinder). Consequently there's no built-in ND filter as on the X100/S, so if you want to use the 35mm lens at F/1. When used with random lenses on an adapter, the XE2 has manually-set controls to correct distortion, color edge shading and falloff correction. In the case of exposure compensation dial, when doing such time-critical types of photography as street, perhaps even a touch too good.You can press this in to magnify the view in the electronic viewfinder, with the ability to then pan around the frame by pressing the AF button and spinning the command dial. To make the camera less obtrusive there's a Silent menu option which turns off the speaker, flash, AF-assist lamp and most importantly the artificially-created shutter-release sound, instantly making the X-E2 perfectly suited to candid photography. Better yet, the Fuji, just like Contax, changes its exposure mode by turning the shutter and/or aperture rings to A when you want them to set themselves.

Lastly, Program mode can be set by setting both the top dial on the camera and the dial on the lens to “A”.A competent photographer learns to see a near correct exposure from the scene in front of him and sets the controls accordingly, whether that is by utilising the fully manual controls or by using aperture priority with added exposure compensation or by other means ie the laborious use of the histogram – take the shot, check the image on the camera back, check the histogram, dial in the compensation go to retake the shot and OH, the decisive moment has gone – dow! What I would like to see going forward, is an automated way to control the minimum shutter speed, depending on the focal length of the lens. The 18-55mm lens' fast maximum apertures in conjunction with the large APS-C sensor make it easy to throw the background out of focus and achieve some really nice bokeh effects. Shooting in JPEG gave some slightly unusual renderings of defocused areas, but the problem was nil in RAW. I'd enjoy using the X-E2 for a wider range of photographic tasks, but perhaps not as much as a Leica M for more specific tasks.

But that’s a separate subject and, to me at least, these issues are far less important simply because they can potentially be fixed. The benefit of the EVF is the same for all EVFs is that you get to preview the actual final result of the image, and the representation on the X-E2 is highly accurate. OIS is a really nice standard zoom that's certainly a cut above the kit lenses that ship with most interchangeable lens cameras.The X-Trans CMOS II also has some dedicated pixels for phase detection, along with the contrast detection. Unique non-Bayer color array that eliminates the need for an anti-alias filter and yields much sharper images compared to other camera, but can limit what software can open the RAF raw files. Thank goodness the X-E2 names files correctly in its high-speed shooting modes; the X-E1 used to name them something completely different than normal shots.