Pro shooting with X10.. some thoughts

I recently bought an X10 to use on days out with the family. It's such a well built little camera though, and potentially it's up to the job for a travel spread, I thought I'd spend a day with it in Venice to see how it handles. I'm a professional photographer, by the way, working for magazines and book publishers and usually shooting with a Nikon D800 and D3s. I wondered if the X10 could be up to the job professionally.
In case this is interesting to anyone thinking about buying the camera, here's what I found…
1. First off, it's great fun. It feels right in the hand and once you get used to the position of dials it's quick and easy to use. I shot mostly on aperture priority, using the compensation dial to get the exposure I wanted.

2. The viewfinder is large and bright enough to work with but the combination of 85% coverage and parallax error make it very approximate. I like to crop as well as I can in camera and found it frustrating to see an image on the screen so different to what I had seen in the viewfinder. So as the day went on I found myself using the LCD more and more for shooting which was not what I had expected with this camera.
Some basic info  - aperture, shutter speed and compensation - at the bottom of the viewfinder would also have been useful.
3. The screen is fine to use, even it bright light. No complaints there.
4. Battery life was really poor. Even shooting most of the time with the LCD switched off each fully charged battery lasted just three hours. I had two batteries with me and had to stop shooting at 4pm. That means for a 'real' full day shooting I'd want to have at least four batteries with me. If I was using it on a travel feature then I'd also be in trouble getting all four recharged in time for the following morning.. I'd need to take a charger for each battery.
5. I was shooting Raw+jpeg but having looked at the files on the computer I don't think, for the moment,  there's much need to shoot Raw with the X10. Using both Silkypix (which was painfully slow) and LR4 I couldn't get as good a result as I was getting with the in-camera jpegs. This is a big turn-off for me as I usually only shoot raw. I guess software will eventually develop to handle EXR files quickly and effectively but until then it's not a practical workflow.
6. Colours are amazing. I was set on Astia for a more subdued colour but still they were coming out much more saturated than I had expected.
7. The lens is very good. At standard focal lengths its incredibly sharp. It also resists flare really well. And when shooting straight into the sun it kept strong contrast across the frame.
So at the end of the day I found the X10 was a lot of fun, it offers great control, some fancy tricks and lovely quality files. I found it a real liberation to work with. Professionally, the file size is fine for editorial use but it probably wouldn't be accepted by the main stock agencies. Obviously 12mp files from the D3s hold up much better when enlarging to agency sizes.
Walking around Venice on a sunny day is not a huge challenge for any camera and although the X10 produced lovely images, and better jpegs than I had expected, the lack of efficient raw processing software means that I would want to depend on it in more demanding situations.
But for days out with the family.. it's perfect
Below are some images.
You can see the full gallery here:
http://www.dpreview.com/galleries/2098842000/albums/venice-fujifilm-x-10









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http://www.colinduttonphotography.com