It's been… one week since I got the X-Pro3 🎶
(Apologies to the Barenaked Ladies… Hehehe, sorry if I gave you an earworm. 😅) It has been a little over a week since I got the Fuji X-Pro3.
(I am a broken record, but I still feel like time means nothing… it doesn’t feel like it’s only been a week)
I have some initial thoughts on it so far. First, the rear screen: it does take getting used to. My main challenge with it isn’t the loss of being able to compose with it, rather the need to flip it down a fair amount to adjust settings. I've worked around it by changing settings using the EVF, but sometimes it is tiring for my eyes to peer into the EVF while navigating a bunch of menu screens which I’m not yet very used to. And of course, secondarily, it is annoying to flip down the screen if I want to review previous shots to ensure I got the focus right. Since I am using a lot of manual focus lenses, I do worry more about getting the focus right. But I also am resigning myself to the fact that I just won’t always get the shot, so might as well go with the flow.
So far, because a lot of the lenses I've been using don’t really “play nice” focal length-wise with the OVF, I've been using the EVF more. But I just recently got a 35mm (~52mm equivalent) lens that would work fine with the OVF, so I’ll try to use it more… Having the cool hybrid OVF was one of the reasons I opted for the X-Pro3 over the X-T4, after all.
It’s so nice to use a lighter camera body. The GFX50s is a heavy beast. I'm happy to have and use it, but sometimes you want lighter kit. I carried the X-Pro3 around my neck and a couple lenses in a mini-backpack today with no real feeling that I was heavily weighed down. This would not be the same experience with the GFX50s. Additionally, the GFX50s's sensor is so big that some of the Nikon lenses I've been using are heavily vignetted. The lenses work better in this regard with the smaller Fuji X-series bodies. And of course, X-mount lenses are much cheaper than GF ones.
Obviously the image quality of the X-Pro3 is great; there was never a question about that. It has some of the newer film simulations that my X-T1 and x100t do not have access to — Classic Neg, Eterna, and Acros. I'm still figuring out the situations in which Classic Neg and Eterna work best since they're very desaturated. Acros is a great black and white film simulation. And I like that there are more granular (pun not intended) settings for the grain effect. You can choose between weak and strong grain, and small or large size. There are a lot of film simulation recipes out there that I need to program into my custom settings. JPEGs straight out of the camera look so great. I often don't need to do much editing in VSCO (on my mobile), unless I want to tweak the mood of the image.
Fuji really have me locked into their ecosystem because of their manual control dials and their awesome film simulations. I find it really hard to consider other camera systems now because of that. I hope they stick around as a camera (and film!) manufacturer. I recently saw news about them branching out into healthcare, which is fine…as long as they don't abandon their camera and film stuff.🤞
Anyway, I've been testing out the camera a bunch. Have a look at this gallery on Flickr for my latest images.
