Sony RX-1 vs. Fuji XE-1 - My take.

I've been playing with both these cameras for the past few weeks with the intent of choosing one as an alternate to my DSLR rigs and main travel camera. I've never been happy with the compromise in image quality you would have to make with compact cameras, so up to this point I've been 'that guy' toting around my 5DmkIII on family outings. I even bought the (amazingly sharp) 40mm pancake lens to make my rig more compact but it's still far from being as small as either of these two cameras.

Build Quality
While both these cameras have a very high end build quality rarely seen these days, the Sony is clearly a step above the with Fuji with its metal lens cap and overall solid construction that makes it feel as if it was machined from a single piece of metal.

RX-1:holds amazing detail in shadows

Design

Here's where I give the Fuji the edge as it most closely captures the feel of my beloved Contax G2. I prefer Fuji's choice of  separate aperture and shutter speed selection dials with the 'A' setting verses Sony's PASM. Call me old school but I really like looking down and seeing the shutter speed with a glance of a dial instead looking at the LCD screen. But one of the biggest nods in the Fuji's favor is the inclusion of a viewfinder - while I'm still not thrilled with the performance of the EVF, it's worlds better than no EVF at all. I really think Sony should have put a viewfinder on the RX-1, I understand they were pushing the envelope on just how small you can make a full frame camera - but I think the slight increase in size to put a viewfinder on the camera would have still resulted in compact design but  it would have made such a big improvement in the way you interact with the camera. I also think it would have resulted in a body size that would be much more proportionally balanced with the lens. I personally don't like the

Performanace
Much has been said on the web on how slow these cameras are in AF in low light, I found neither one unacceptable and much better than I could have done manually. I found AF tracking of moving subjects poor on both cameras that may be disappointing to those who enjoy shooting active subjects.
With well lit subjects, I found both cameras equally snappy in their ability lock focus. General menu navigation and image review and zooming did appear to be slightly better with the Sony but overall, I'd call this one a tie.

RX-1 Beautiful color and Bokeh

 Image Quality
It all comes down to this right? What good is all the handling, ergonomics and compact size advantages if you don't end up with images that make you happy. Neither camera disappoints in this area, both produce beautiful and have low light capabilities that until now was unseen in the compact segment. But the adv pantage goes to Sony with it's extra Megapixels and that beautiful Zeiss lens that can really resolve some amazing detail and can go along way in making up for its fixed 35mm lens with some post processing cropping.
My comparisons may be a bit unfair since the Fuji had a zoom lens vs. a prime but the Sony was giving my 5DmkIII a run for its money so I don't think I'm going too far out on a limb to say that swapping out the zoom would have reversed my opinion.

FUJI XE-1 ISO 6400 Holds detail and color well,  Noise has a very film like grain quality

Conclusion
While +Steve Huff did the same comparison and chose the RX-1 as his personal choice. I came to the opposite conclusion, for me, the Fuji's controls, design of operation and VIEWFINDER won me over. It may be totally superficial but I felt as though I was more 'in touch' with the photographic process with the Fuji. It felt more like a tool in my hand for me to craft my art instead of the latest wiz-bang gadget - and that was significant enough for me to overlook the IQ advantage of the Sony. Some may find the price difference alone enough reason to choose the Fuji but I find that the hurt in the wallet is only temporary, but the sting of dealing with a camera you don't enjoy is much longer lasting. In fact, if Sony would have released the RX-1 with a viewfinder and better controls, I would have no hesitation in paying the asking price. But for now, the Fuji XE-1 will be at my side...

FUJI XE-1: 18-55mm kit lens is no slouch and capable of some sharp images.

Is it time to ditch the SLR?

Canon 5DmkIII w/40mm F2.8 Pancake vs. Fujifilm XE-1 w/18-55mm F2.8-4.0

Every so often I find myself blabbing on how, when I shot film, I sold off all my SLR gear and bought my best loved camera of all time, a Contax G2. It's autofocus was slow, the Carl Zeiss T* prime lenses I had weren't terribly fast but the camera oozed Swiss watch build quality in a small, light-weight, discrete package and boy, shoot a roll of slide film and prepare to drool when you pull it from the developer. To this day with all the cameras I've gone through, I have not had one that I have loved more. While my current 5DmkIII and bag full of 'L' glass can produce some stunning images. They're Critically sharp, high contrast images that the engineer in me really appreciates but the artist in me finds them sterile. I think I understand what Leica owners talk about when they say one camera can render a scene more beautifully than another.

So here we are at the end of 2012 and I'm looking for a compact camera worthy of dumping all my SLR gear over - and we're pretty close. Right now I'm test driving a Fujifilm XE-1, which, while not a pocket camera, with its largest lens attached, it is much smaller than my 5D is with its smallest lens attached- and the whole package weighs less than just one of my 'L' lenses. It's 16 megapixel, APS-C sensor promises to have the resolving power of a full frame. While I haven't taken many shots yet, just playing with it around the house, it appears the IQ is quite good. Good enough to put my 5D on Craigslist? We'll see...

Why I chose Windows 8

I recently built a new monster photo-editing rig - I wanted a fast box to speed up my workflow so I overclocked the latest Ivy Bridge core I7, stuffed it with as much ram as the motherboard could take and filled the drive bays with the latest SSDs. But when it came time to choose and operating system, I discovered my initial choice (my current copy of windows 7) didn't support more than 16GB of ram. I'd have to shell out $90 to upgrade it to the a Win7 Pro version. That was all the excuse I needed to experiment a bit.
I had already been running the RTM version of Windows 8 on my Slate so I was already familiar with it and found it to be very stable. When I went to the Microsoft site to get a release copy to evaluate, I discovered the my first reason for helping my seal the deal for W8...

Cost: Microsoft wants to get everybody over to W8 so if they're running a promotion til the end of the year that if you bought (or built) a computer after July 2012, you can get a full released version of W8 PROFESSIONAL edition for $14.95. Yep, that's right a full install OS for less than $15 - and not just the basic bottom tier version but the PRO edition that I needed to support my 32GB of ram. It was so cheap I bought and extra copy to put on my Slate.

 Speed: WIN8 really optimizes the Boot process compared to WIN7, I can go from power off to sign on in about 10 seconds and that includes BIOS post process. Because of it's fresh release it was built with the latest driver protocols that make use of USB 3.0 - these were still a bit wonky on my old WIN7 box. Actually all my devices had appropriate drivers included in the initial install which has be a first for me in the years I've been building computers.

Storage Spaces: I don't know why Microsoft doesn't market this more but they took a bit of their server technology and built it into the OS. If you don't know, Storage Spaces is kind of like a 'Drobo' approach to storage - you can take a bunch of hard drives of various sizes and interfaces (even external USB drives) and create a pool of storage from which you can provision virtual drives that show up in explorer. You can also select whether you want your data mirrored or striped across multiple drives to allow for data recovery should one or more of the pool drive fail. The OS takes care of everything, if you start running low on space in the pool, the OS warns you and all you need to do is plug in a new drive (or swap a drive out with one of more capacity), add it to the pool and the OS does the rest. Pretty cool. In the past, when my image collection was filling up a drive, I'd buy a larger one, copy all the images over then toss the old drive in the closet. Now I can just freely add capacity and forget about any copying.

Been using this setup for a few months now and through several large shoots with no problems. I've found the OS to be stable on the desktop with a lot of little improvements over WIN7 and nothing I miss - NOT EVEN THE START MENU - I honestly don't understand why the tech media says the new interface is great for touch but sucks on the desktop. While I didn't use the start menu all that much in WIN7, it nothing more than a application launcher, WIN8 has a launcher, it just looks different. While the main tile interface may not contain every installed application one keypress will pull up a display that does...Better yet just start typing the name of the app and it's icon will typically show up ready to launch by time you type the third letter... I really don't think it's worse, or better --- just different.

Hoodman 'Raw Steel' CF Cardreader - USB 3.0 rocks

USB 3.0 is blazing fast but it's not without some faults. Mainly, the with the infancy of the interface, there are quite a few peripherals out there that are labeled USB 3.0 but do not conform to the standard.  I ran it to that recently with my Kingston CF card reader - worked great with Windows 7 but was reduced to a USB 2.0 device with my new box which is running Windows 8. Yes, I know, windows 8 is still a preview and not a final product. But according to the Building Windows 8 blog the USB 3.0 stack in the windows 8 kernel was built from the ground up to the latest standard so I'm taking the position that if something ain't working - it's the device's fault. And to that end, I am happy to find that my latest CF card reader, the Hoodman USB 3.0 Raw Steel UDMA card reader works like a charm with my windows 8 install. Using Sandisk Extreme Pro 32Gb cards I'm getting a rock solid 80Mb/sec transfer rate. Which equates to roughly a little over 3 minutes to download 1000+ (26Gb) of 18Mpixel Raw files (which is a typical football shoot) to the hard disk. While I use to be able to go have a cup of coffee while my images download, now my download is complete before I'm finished grinding the beans.
Another thing I like about the Hoodman is that it is firmware upgradeable, for example Hoodman recently released a firmware update to make the CF reader UDMA 7 compliant. ---I couldn't find any support downloads for the Kingston. So if you looking for a Windows 8 compatible USB 3.0 CF reader - The Hoodman is a good choice

Dream Camera...(revisited)

Back in 2006, I wrote a post which listed all the cameras I've owned  through the years and made a presumptuous conclusion that my days of upgrading were over since I obtained my "Dream Camera", a Canon 1DmkII.  Silly me..
Since then I've had 3 bodies:
Canon 5DmkII - A great image sensor trapped in a slow focusing, mid-grade build quality body.
Canon 5DmkIII - A super image sensor wrapped in a solid body and endowed with the modern AF system of the top of the line 1Dx. An excellent camera that should do more than any photographer short of the sports shooter could ask for.
Canon 1Dx - The top dawg, IQ, high ISO capability and dynamic range that made me choose it, and its premium $$, over the 5D.
My glass collection has also grown to now include: 15mm 2.8 fisheye,14mmF2.8, 24mm 3.5 TS-E II, 17-40F4L,24-105F4LIS,50F1.8, 70-200F2.8LIS II,85F1.2L, 100mmF2.8L Macro, and my baby the 300F2.8L.

So NOW am I done?...hardly. I know better. I can probably say that I'm done with DSLRs at this point as my dream camera now is a one of the new Compact System Cameras. As sensor technology advances, these smaller sensor formats will keep all the advantages of lighter, more compact bodies and lenses without any compromise in image quality. Manufacturers are pretty close to hitting the sweet spot and I'm about to sell my 5DmkIII to move to one of these gems. Leading the pack is the Fuji ex-1 followed by the Sony Nex-6 and with the awesome lenses available for the micro 4/3s systems, those are high on the list as well...

Workflow test: Canon 1Dx

So one of the things I was really looking forward to with my 1Dx was superfast image transfers with it's built in Ethernet port. The 1Dx can be set to connect to a network and upload files to an FTP server either for shooting tethered or for downloading all images after a shoot (which was my interest). I was salivating over the possibility of hooking this up to my gigabit network and sucking a 32Gig shoot down in a few minutes. But as soon as I configured my FTP server and set up the camera to send my first shoot my bubble went bust... a paltry 17MB/sec throughput (slower than my  USB 2.0 reader) Switching to the USB 3.0 port of the camera wasn't much better, averaging just 24MB/sec. So while these interfaces are probably a big improvement for tethered shooting, for larger transfers it looks like the card reader will still reign supreme. Damn shame...

Building a better box for Lightroom...not really

So I finally got tired of putting up with what I thought was an out of date computer system (pre intel 'core i' ) Decided to build a box specifically aimed at speeding up my Lightroom workflow. The latest Ivy Bridge 3770k with 4 hyperthreaded cores overclocked to 4.3Ghz, 32 Gb of ram, 3 SSDs: 1 for the OS, 1 as 'working area' to store the raw files of any shoot actively being worked and 1 SSD dedicated to the Lightroom catalogue database and associated previous. USB3.0 card readers for quick downloading. All running under the control of the svelte Windows 8 operating system.

 This box is fricken hot, but did it do anything for my workflow? Well not really. Improvement was rather disappointing. Importing, and rendering a big shoot is still a  'start and go watch TV' process. Most disappointing is that the image to image load time is still a couple tenths of a second which doesn't sound like much but after shooting a football game at 12 frames a second I want to quickly scan through my shoot to grab the keepers. With this hardware expect (and should get )  INSTANTANEOUS image to image load times. Lightroom is great, but its just a pig so I'm crossing my fingers that they add some GPU acceleration and other speed trick for Lightroom 5.

So I'm calling this new box build a bust for lightroom but as a consolation, I think I'm gonna throw in a NVIDA 660ti and make one rocking gaming box!