A warning about the peculiar ergonomics of the X-H2S

White-collar wrote:

On the xt4 you can have, essentially, 7 different q menus for different setups. The manual calls them banks and they are selected ( once set up) through the upper left item on the q menu. That item changes from base to c1 to c2 etc.

This is going to be a bit pedantic, but I’ve seen one or two blogs/reviews out there that are a bit misleading in this respect, so…

They’re not different Q Menus, they’re different settings. It works like this—and I’ll (rightly or wrongly) use the term “parameter” for something whose value you can change (eg “Highlights” or “Sharpness” or “WB”) and “value” for a value you can select for that parameter (eg “-2” or “Daylight”). The former isn’t quite the term I’m looking for, but my brain’s clearly got a blind spot right now, so I’ll have to roll with that…

Each “customs settings” bank (1-7) holds a number of values that you set for a predetermined (by Fujifilm) set of parameters. That set of parameters varies a little between cameras: they all incorporate things like film simulation, sharpness, DR mode etc; but some include more, like AF mode and so on.

The Q Menu gives you access to up to 15 options. But note: the set of parameters in the Q Menu is not the same as the set of parameters stored in a custom settings bank, and this is doubly true where you customise the Q Menu and/or reduce its size. For instance, AF mode appears in the Q Menu by default but is not part of the custom settings in many bodies; and equally you can remove things like sharpness and NR from the Q Menu, but they’re still part of the custom settings.

The Q Menu is always the same until you configure it differently—ie it allows you to see the current values of, and change the values of the same set of parameters. When you select a custom settings bank, the values stored in that bank are applied to the camera, and where a parameter is in both the settings bank and the Q Menu, the value shown in the Q Menu is naturally updated to match the one that’s just been applied the settings bank.

In short, when you select custom settings, then some things in the Q Menu will probably be unaffected, while some things not in the Q Menu may be.

The Q Menu, like My Menu (albeit with a different interaction design), is just a window onto a subset of the camera’s full set of parameters, it’s not a set of values.