FUJIFILM XF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 R LM OIS WR Lens - Any Good?

I like the biting Nikon look. That is the quality I really want in an image. Not saying Nikon is significantly better. We all strive for a certain look in our photos. I just never found it in Fuji.

And just to show it can be used for other things as well:

I saw this thread this morning but unfortunately was too busy to sit down and write a coherent reply - since then most of the points have been covered.

Needless to say it's a super lens - it doesn't have Fuji's red badge for nothing!

RE the above photo. That is a SOOC JPG shot in 1.25x crop mode and cropped further but it is at full zoom of 400mm and the players are at the complete opposite end of the football field from where I was set up. I have no doubt if it had been a RAW photo at full res it would look considerably better still. However for my media work I just shoot JPG to allow for less buffering and less PP afterwards.

The annoying thing is I only bought the lens the week I shot this match and it was the final match of the season so I have to wait until end of August now to really put it through it's paces. As it is, I have been trying (and failing horribly) to get some wildlife shots to pass the time!

Stuart VC wrote:

And the OOF areas look really nice too. I’d be happy to own it.

I like how people ask if a lens is sharp, but provide no details on how they intend to share and view their photos.

In order to get a concise answer, you need to be concise about the issue at hand. Otherwise, you’re gonna get a wide range of answers and opinions, that may not be that helpful tbh.

But, I like how people just started sharing photos, because in this case, a picture is with a thousand words

If i understand you correctly, you should be able to let the Fuji mimic the Nikon by increasing the sharpness and contrast sliders in post processing.
Did you ever try such thing?

The one thing I do (and I would recommend to anyone else) is set the Noise Reduction in camera to -4. 
This negates all the Fuji NR processing which is probably the weakest aspect of their IQ in my opinion. 
Some higher ISO images will exhibit slightly more noise but they’re pin sharp and don’t have that plasticky look to them. I’ve found this particularly useful for longer focal lengths where resolution may become a factor for small or far away subjects.

I owned one and eventually sold it for the 70-300 and 1.4 extender. The 100-400 is excellent optically. Didn't use it for birds in flight, but mainly for long landscapes or larger wildlife (mountain goats, marmots, etc). I sold it because it was just too big and heavy for me to easily handle by hand and I had to use very high shutter speeds as a result which limited my aperture choices.