I decided my X-Pro1 was looking a bit underloved. It wasn’t getting any use and I had even been wondering if I should sell it. I wasn’t very inspired by the new Fuji offering announced yesterday, the X-E1, but but it did make me think about taking my X-Pro1 out for once. As we were going to Lee Valley park farms  yesterday I thought it would be a good opportunity to take the X-pro1 for a “spin”. I did take other lenses but I ended up shooting all day with the 35mm.

I should say now that we throughly enjoyed our visit to Lee Valley park farms, especially my son, Daniel!

Here are the rest of my pictures from that trip:

Some thoughts on the X-Pro1 while I’m here.

It really is a very good camera (and potentially an excellent one). The IQ isn’t far off my M9, despite it being APS-C. However, it does have some drawbacks, which mean at the moment it is not getting a lot of use. The biggest of these isn’t the iffy AF that reviewers have pointed to but the lack of decent RAW processing. The RAW files just don’t seem very malleable to me.

I don’t mean the apparent issue about fine detail mush of foliage that I’ve read so much about on DPreview – to me that seems like a bit of a pixel peepers problem. No, its about the fact the IQ breaks down very quickly with simple standard tweaks to things like blacks, whites and highlights. If Fuji work with Adobe and/or Apple to sort out this issue I would use the camera more, a lot more, no question.

Does this camera need faster AF? Only in low light and macro mode. What it really needs is improvements to read and write times and a (much) improved MF implementation. I would note that (having taken out my X100 today) those who say the X100 is faster are smoking something good. It isn’t.

The promised improvements to AF will be good, but I’m more interested in the new lenses. The 14mm to be precise! I’m not that bothered about the new zoom, but a UWA lens would be great and I may sell my (underused) 18mm to fund it.