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

Jeff Biscuits wrote:

FTOG wrote:

If you're using lenses with aperture rings and the physical Exp Comp dial, have you tried enabling your X-E3 to control ISO on the front command dial?

I hate those dials 😀

Reason: they always get moved accidentally, especially the front one. Taking a camera in and out of a bag, carrying it… it ends up a lottery. I always deactivate them both.

When the camera is off in the bag, the dial has no effect.

Can't say this happens to me to any meaningful degree, whether it was with my X-E2 nor my two X-E3s. But obviously your mileage does vary, and I don't mean to question your experience.

The thing that gets me is that they’re both clickable, so it would work really well if you could click to activate it, change a setting, and click again to make the dial unresponsive.

You can sort of do this. If memory serves me right, the click will cycle through aperture and ISO control, even when the aperture is set on the lens (and won't be adjusted).

Click to "adjust" aperture -> pseudo locked
Click to adjust ISO -> unlock for ISO adjustment
Click to "adjust" aperture -> re-engage "lock"

It baffles me that Fuji only let you use them for aperture, shutter speed or ISO, especially given that they generally go out of their way to provide those as dedicated controls

When the exposure compensation dial is on C, you can also adjust exposure compensation with them. (Yes, I know this is not what you ask.)

(yeah, I know not all lenses/bodies have all those controls, and yeah, I know some people do want to fine tune shutter speed—though personally I can’t get my head round having to use two controls to adjust it). There are so many other things they could usefully do other than replicate the function of dedicated controls.

A bit of a contradiction to your issue of these dials accidentally being adjusted: Any settings that aren't these linear adjustments will change a whole lot more by cycling through a few steps. Imagine the confusion if these cycled through custom settings, changing dozens of settings rather than just one.

Besides, it doesn’t solve the issue of having to faff about with it every time new a custom settings mode is selected 😉

Ultimately, I believe Fuji wants to service people with ask overlapping with yours. But the camera they want to sell you for it are X-T and X-Pro lines.

I love the small X-E bodies. There are some things I wish these bodies didn't do, and some things I wish they did. I'd love it if there was an X-E Pro/EVF-only X-Pro, with the X-T viewfinder (I don't care for the hybrid VF), WR sealing and that wasn't a third heavier like the X-Pro bodies. But ultimately we will never get our dream camera, so all we can do is the one closest to it.