First Look: Fujifilm X-S10 for Bird Photography
As someone who has shot Fujifilm exclusively since 2016 I take a close look at any new offering that Fuji releases. When the Fuji X-T4 came out, I did decide that the upgrade wasn’t enough to warrant paying for the upgrade, and I’ve been happily shooting away with my X-T3. I also own an X-T20 as a second body, and Laurie is shooting with my handed-down X-T2. Both of those has the smaller, older sensor than the one found in the X-T3, X-T30 and X-T4, and I felt that at some point it would make sense to upgrade them. Fuji has generally released the X-n0 camera 6-9 months after the release of the big flagship body, so I’ve been keeping my eyes out for what I thought would be the X-T40.
Fuji, it turns out, had other plans, and that was the X-S10. The X-S10 is priced similarly to what I expected the X-T40 to cost, about $1,000. That compares to $1700 for the X-T4, about $1500 for the X-T3 and about $800 for the X-T30 (all prices body only, U.S. prices). It has the same 26 Megapixel sensor at the X-T3 and X-T4 so I expected and is using the same Autofocus system at the X-T4. This immediately caught my attention. And then I realized Fuji had added IBIS (In Body Image Stabilization) into the camera, until now only available in the X-T4.
Count me in. I immediately pre-ordered two bodies, one for me and one for Laurie. They arrived last week, and I’ve been out shooting with it on a few trips this last week.
Here are my first impressions.
What you get. What you don’t.
Fuji differentiates the X-Tn0 bodies from their flagship big brothers by limiting some of the features and functionality. The X-T3 has dual card slots, for instance, while the X-T30 has one, and on the X-T30 it’s moved down into the battery area. The X-T30 also has a slower max burst speed. Overall, though, the X-Tn0 are very well thought out but less expensive cameras and quite good enough for most photographers for day to day use, and so I’ve been recommending them to people unless they really feel they need the flagship body for some specific reason. (hint: you probably don’t).
The X-S10 continues in that tradition. It comes at a reduced price from the X-T4 by limiting some features. The big ones: it features that single card slot rather than two; the camera controls are significantly simplified with fewer buttons and dials. That reduces camera manufacturing costs and complexity, so this is a simpler camera to operate. I should note that all of the functionality is in there, but you may need to round trip through menus to access it rather than configure a button or a wheel to trigger it.
If you are someone — like me — who’s gotten used to customizing your camera to fit your preferences, this is going to cause your muscle memory to break badly. In my case, the big challenge was that I lost the front button, which I used to trigger autofocus. It took me a couple of hours of experimentation to come up with a new camera setup that works well — but once I did, things worked great. The X-S10 also lost the four buttons around the menu button on the back.
A few — weird decisions
There are a few weird decisions in the choices they made with this camera. As you can see from the picture above, there are two dials on top of the X-S10 instead of three. The knob on the right, over the X-S10 logo, called the Fn dial. For some reason, Fuji limited this dial in terms of what capabilities could be assigned to this dial. By default, it lets you choose film simulations. In the configuration menus, you can change that — to choose film simulations UNLESS you’re in Manual exposure mode, at which point it can be used for exposure compensation. This limitation feels arbitrary and unnecessary and I’m not sure why Fuji did this. As someone who never uses film simulations — I shoot 100% raw, 100% of the time — this dial more or less won’t exist in my shooting.
On the back of the camera, just below that Fn dial, is a button. If you press that button, it lets you pick your bracketing mode. These capabilites include not just one shot or burst photography, but ISO, White Balance, Exposure, HDR, Panorama and multiple exposure modes. Burst mode has two options: Low speed (3-5 frames per second) or high speed (8 to a whopping 30 frames per second if you use the electronic shutter).
What’s weird about this button is it’s not programmable, unlike basically everything else on the camera. It’s hardwired to this function. Why? This would be something I would happily move to the quick menu so I could potentially put some other function onto this button, like depth of field preview. Except — I can’t. And I can’t think of an engineering or technical reason not to make it as flexible as the other controls. Weird. Minor detail — but weird.
IBIS (In Body Image Stabilization)
The X-S10 includes IBIS, which does image stabilization even with lenses that aren’t stabilized (they typically have OIS in the product name). It offers up to six stops of shake reduction, which allows you to shoot at much lower shutter speeds before needing to lock the camera onto a tripod. It also works with in-lens stabilization if it’s available, kicking up the stabilization even more. The end result, in theory, is you can shoot longer lenses at slower shutter speeds and lower ISOs while still getting sharp, crisp images. My initial tests seem to show that’s exactly what I’m getting, and I’m encouraged at the opportunities but want to do more extensive tests and see what I get.
The photos I’m including in this article are all from the X-S10 paired to my Fuji X 100-400 lens without teleconverter. Here are screen grabs of a couple of shots at 100% for you pixelpeepers.
Early Results
I’ve taken the camera out shooting 3 times this week, all in good light and good weather conditions. My early tests focussed (sorry) on the AutoFocus systems to see if they were better than the X-T3 and by how much. My initial reaction more or less boils down to “wow!”
The Fuji X systems have a very capable but somewhat complicated AF system. Once you learn how to use it and how to influence it’s decisions (see Configuring a Fuji X-T3 for Bird Photography for the gory details) it’s awesome, and it’s quite good out of the box before you start training it (and it starts training you). For my bird photography work, I tended to use point (1-3 focus point squares) or zone (3-9 squares) almost exclusively in that I found far too often if I went with the wide zone or the entire sensor active I would see focus lock onto the water in front of a bird, or the branches near a bird — things with more visible contrast lines than the subject. On the X-T3, you have to switch between the AF moves in a menu and then adjust the size of the AF area with a dial. In the X-S10, there’s a new AF configuration “ALL”, which switches automatically as you dial in the AF area you want. A small but very welcome improvement because it’s one less reason to have to look away from a developing situation to tweak the camera; you can now dial in without having to worry about switching modes while never moving your eye off what you’re going to photograph.
I started out trying the wide field to see if things had improved since my X-T3, and the answer is definitely yes. I am getting much better and more appropriate AF locks with the X-S10. The pelicans above were in a wide field setup with AF active across most of the sensor and against a flat sky like that, AF was very fast and accurate and stayed locked on in AF-Continuous mode well.
Against more cluttered backgrounds or on the water, with wider AF fields I still found some tendency to lock on just ahead of the main subject, but it locked on fine a lot more than the X-T3 and the distance between the subject and the focus point seems much narrower. I often couldn’t see the AF missed at less than 100% magnification, and what was there was quite minor. This does tell me that we still need to use the smallest focus area possible — I definitely wouldn’t set this to a wide field and expect it to just work magically under all circumstances. The AF improvements, however look to be quite nice. It’s also early in my testing, but it seems to do a better job of dealing with clutter in front of a subject — look at the mockingbird in the first batch of photos where it locked onto the bird and not the tree in front of it.
For all of these tests, I was in AF-Continuous mode, and the AF-C Custom Settings were set to the default “1” — Multi-purpose. I won’t even start testing how that affects AF until I have more time in with this body.
Buttons and Dials
A few quick thoughts on buttons and dials. On my X-T3, I did a lot of customization. One of the key ones was to remove AF from the shutter and move it to the front button, so I could activate the shutter with one finger and AF with another. On the X-S10, the front button is gone. I am left eye dominant which means if I try to use the AF-ON button for AF with my thumb, it finds my nose is already there and in the way. It took me a few experiments to figure out what worked, but I ended up really liking re-programming the ISO button on top of the camera as my AF button (with ISO moving into the quick menu). Essentially, it’s the same two fingers shifted backwards and reversing responsibilites. Once I started using that, it quickly felt natural and worked reliably for me.
Also, because I am left eye dominant, I’ve disabled the touch screen, because when I’m viewing through the EVF, my nose is regularly hitting the touch screen and doing things for me I didn’t ask to be done. I have added enable/disable touch screen to the quick menu so I can easily flip it on when I’m on a tripod, though.
I also found I was shifting the focus area around inadvertently by hitting the tilt button that’s near the screen. Once I figured out how to turn that off unless I pressed the button first (it’s in the Focus Lever menu, set Tilt to OFF) I’m really happy with how I am operating with the camera.
The TL/DR — I like it!
So, with three short trips and about 500 images under my belt, what do I think?
I really like it. As of right now, it is becoming my primary body for bird photography, with my X-T3 being relegated to second body status. I’m going to be headed out to Merced NWR soon where I hope to put it through its paces more extensively. I do want to see how well it works in poor light, which I haven’t tested yet, but I am confident I’ll like the results.
I need to do some head to head tests with IBIS on and off to compare the difference, too. And I haven’t even started to see how this all works as a video camera.
My bottom line is this: whenever I go out and shoot these kinds of subjects, I expect a certain percentage — between 10% and 15% of images will be failed for bad AF. For these first three outings, that number was about half that. It seems pretty clear the X-S10 AF is faster and more accurate, meaning I lose fewer shots to it locking on the wrong thing or failing to lock on at all. the IBIS system seems to be doing it’s job of stabilizing images to remove camera shake well, even with really long lenses like my 100-400 on a teleconverter. Being able to shoot hand-held is a big advantage, and if this allows me to do so later into dusk or in very dark, cloudy conditions, that makes possible shots you’re going to lose if you’re locked down on a tripod.
This camera body has a few quirks, but I hesitate to call them flaws. In the field, it quickly became comfortable to use and I started generating nice images reliably. I’m finding the AF a nice improvement and I’m quickly getting confident that if I see a possible shot — even bird flight shots — I have a good chance of pulling it off.
For a bird photographer, that’s gold.
As I test more and have more data, I’ll follow up on this initial overview. If you have specific questions about the camera, drop me a note and I’ll try to answer them as I can.
