Custom settings and how I’ve lost my love for the X-E series

I read this a few times and I really don't get it. My reply probably will sound critical but it's just my reaction, by all means use your cameras in the way that you like most.

Essentially you had the X-E1/2/3 (and many other cameras) but now that you've tried a camera with an ISO dial that is what you prefer?

Jeff Biscuits wrote:

…until you become a habitually fully-manual user.

Firstly, that 1/180 position on the shutter speed dial. Every other click is a full stop, but the two clicks either side of this position are half a stop. This makes it much harder with the X-Es to adjust exposure by feel alone. (I perhaps exaggerate a little, because of course exposure is reflected in the EVF, but it’s an annoyance nonetheless, particularly if you want to mainatain exposure but adjust aperture by a stop or two.)

If you're manually choosing a shutter speed then is it not for a purpose? To stop fast motion, to let in more light, to create blur?

Just like you're choosing an aperture to control depth of field and quantity of light.

What do you gain by manually setting ISO to anything other than the lowest possible value that properly exposes with your specified shutter and aperture settings.

In my opinion auto ISO is the preffered mode. Why would you go from say 1/125 to 1/250 to offset going from f/2.8 to f/2 when instead you could just keep the shutter speed you wanted and allow the ISO to maintain the exposure. Not to mention the fact that you can fine tune it in third stops by simply adjusting the exposure comp. dial that is placed as prominently as possible at the corner of your camera.

The second issue is the absence of an ISO dial. This relates to something which for me is much more significant and, for some, a bit of a contentious topic in Fujifilm’s firmware.

Without the ISO dial, ISO becomes part of the custom settings.

And for me, that’s a problem.

Everything else in the custom settings (other than DR mode, but I never use that) is related to processing the raw image data, not to capturing the image in the first place.

To me this sounds like you're just deep in C1-C7 as jpeg recipes and maybe that's why I don't relate. I tried that but I don't enjoy it.

And doesn't it make a fair amount of sense to specify ISO within that? It's not like you could change the ISO of your film mid roll. I find the white balance shifts that get used to get the desired look much more problematic than defining an ISO value.

So for me, custom settings are about the JPEG that is produced. The raw file should be the same no matter which custom setting I used. But without an ISO dial, every time I change custom settings, I get the ISO that was saved with those settings. Which means that for my now-most-used way of shooting, every time I change custom settings, I have to then go into the menu, change the ISO to what I want, and then I’m good to go.

With ISO invariance you could theoretically shoot everything at base ISO and just adjust the exposure after the fact if you're shooting raw.

I regularly forget to do this and get thrown by the fact that I’ve ended up with auto ISO, meaning that I’m no longer fully manual. (Yes, I could change them all to one fixed ISO—but chosen for which conditions? It doesn’t really solve the problem.)

I mean you're literally already in the Q menu to change your custom setting so how is it confusing to set your desired ISO at the same time you alter your custom setting.

if you have already determined what aperture and shutter speed you want shouldn't auto ISO just give you what you wanted anyway? Not to mention the fact that you can tune it via exposure compensation in this scenario.

The reality is that there are two types of settings that users want to customise and save: those which affect the actual taking of the shot (ISO, focus mode/area/etc, DR mode, crop/digital converter modes, and so on) and those which affect the processing of the image (tone curve, film simulation, NR, etc). Pre-exposure and post-exposure.

On my X-E4 I've got the Q menu set to all the things I routinely change and few of them relate to what you term as post exposure: C1-C7 (which I never use), ISO, White Balance, Mechanical/Electronic shutter, MF/AF-S/AF-C, AF mode, MF assist type, Self Timer, Photometry, LCD Brightness, Film Simulation, Image Quality (raw/jpeg), DR (which I always keep at 100).

The bothersome fact is that Fuji (and, I suspect, every other camera manufacturer—so it seems from my experience) can’t split these two properly. In the latest traditional-control models (X-E4, X-T30 II) they’ve been further mixing them, much to some people’s displeasure. It’s like going back to all those earlier compact cameras which generally had a couple of custom modes: they were always based on a PASM choice as well as AF settings and image style, which was frustrating (in most cases if you wanted to change only the PASM setting, it was a particularly difficult process). For years I had wanted “virtual films” to drop in, leaving shooting settings controlled as normal, but until I found the X system I’d never seen anyone do it.

Isn't this just like applying presets to your RAW files?

There is a place for both, especially for those who prefer the PASM model and/or make use of more advanced AF features in different scenarios. Why not two mode dials, or at least one on a dial and one in a menu? You could even choose whether you prefer the custom post-exposure settings on the dial (as I do, and as is more aligned with traditional controls) or the custom pre-exposure settings (which seems more in line with the X-H model and PASM ways of working).

In any case, this has honed my choice of cameras neatly to just four models: the X-Pro2 and 3, and the X100F and V. They’re the only ones where I can use custom settings for image styles without the camera getting in the way of manual shooting. And that’s fine, not least because I have two of those.

But along the way, my beloved X-E3 has fallen from favour and may be sold. I shall miss it, I’m sure. And the only thing that really undid it was that mingling of pre-exposure and post-exposure settings.

No reason to miss the X-E if you've replaced it with an X-Pro. You spent more money but got a better camera.

I wonder if they’ll ever be properly separated.