X-E1 & X-Pro1 Dynamic Range

Local contrast in certain areas is not something given by some deity, it's something you build in post process. The limits you bang into working with shadows are risk of colour shifts (or colour blindness) and emergence of noise. My experience is that XP-1 shadows are very good from this point of view: if you don't try to turn a coal mine into a sunny afternoon, you can recover a good lot of interesting detail. My workflow is: translate RAW via the Silkypix thing doing the minimum necessary to get a histogram with clear sides (no curves banging either left or rigt), and then do all the rest in some program I know better, like Photoshop or LR.