Anyone moved from the X100V to the X-E4?

Thanks. It’s more a fundamental issue of combining the shooting settings (like AF behaviours, lens metadata, ISO, all sorts of stuff) in the same banks as the image processing settings (everything that’s used to generate a JPEG once a shot has been taken, ie the tone curve, clarity, film sim, etc).

Both are completely valid sets of things to configure, but they’re completely separate: the former take effect only before the image is a captured, and the latter only afterwards.

Since the X-Pro1 (maybe since the original X100, not sure) Fuji has used the custom settings for only the latter: the image processing. (Well, not quite only the latter. There have always been two exceptions: the DR setting and, for cameras with no dedicated dial, ISO. These are shooting settings.)

Historically, many PASM cameras, especially compacts (including older Fujifilm ones like the X20, XF1, etc) have provided custom modes which do combine shooting and processing settings, but generally they’ve had very limited processing settings; or in some cases they output raw files, and if you use raws then the processing settings don’t matter beyond affecting what you see in the viewfinder (eg sometimes it’s helpful to compose in B&W even if you’re not committing to B&W at exposure time).

But Fuji has trained us differently. They’ve provided excellent JPEG engines (I always shot raw until I bought into Fuji). They’ve provided lots of configuration of processing parameters. And they’ve provided the ability to store seven styles.

Some people have found that frustrating because they’re used to the PASM approach to custom modes. But for those of us who like the traditional controls and not spending ages in Lightroom it’s been great: you get full control of the exposure with dials, and the ability to “change film” whenever you like.

But that’s not possible now. If I “change film” then the shooting settings are swept away and replaced. The only way to avoid that is to always use the exact same shooting settings. (Or, I guess, the exact same image processing settings, effectively making a raw-only camera.) Which isn’t reasonable, even for someone like me who barely changes any of them. Simply having the AF mode and area reset every time is enough to ruin the whole usability of the camera.

Fuji clearly decided to start catering for people who want to save shooting settings for different scenarios (great!) but to me it seems they failed to comprehend the difference between these two types of settings, and why they should be kept apart.