Ok, the reviews for the next while are going to be unstructured. Actually, most of mine are anyway, my preferred format being the experience report or anecdotal exploration of a topic.
So I was in my kitchen and Jon was cooking the steaks for the evening. I had the X-S1 with me and thought I might capture an image of him. The cam was on my usual settings, which included auto ISO 3200 and that’s what it chose for this image.
Now, despite all the accolades that Fuji get for the X10 and the X-S1 regarding the sensor and its image quality, you do still get some grain. But the light was not too bad here and the grain is tolerable. I exported a pair of images, a SOOC JPEG and an edited RAF. I chose a lighter and cleaner presentation for the RAF, but many will prefer the JPEG.
First, a 100% screen shot of the grain …
You can see that skin texture is visible and that there are individual hairs visible, even where the hair is clumped together. The grain is very obvious, yet does not harm the image all that much. When downsized, the image is in fact quite sharp.
fuji x-s1 3200iso f/5 1/25 62mm (EFL 338mm)
Here is the RAF as processed in LR 4.1.
Clearly, this lens works pretty well at short to medium lengths. Indoors, it is very usable at 3200 ISO in my opinion. However, you will obviously see much less performance as the light gets really dim or really off color. This was a mix of halogen and daylight, which is always awful …. and that’s why I reduced the saturation in my version. It makes it easier to get a uniform skin color.
