Fujifilm X-H2 - Hands On Review

this is the fujifilm xh2 which along with the xh2s that was launched a little bit earlier this year it's fuji's latest flagship camera it's got their fifth generation sensor their fifth generation processor and with the xh2s fuji is saying that's all about speed but this camera which can record 40 megapixels got a 40 megapixel sensor and can record video in 8k as well as having in body stabilization fuji saying this camera is all about power so resolution on the x system has been hovering around 24 to 26 megapixel ever since the xt2 so for three generations now it looked as though fuji were only really interested in pushing the resolution in their gfx cameras so this is quite a big jump and big news for fuji users now i was able to use the camera for about five days while i was in new york and get a feel for it and see what it's like i'm actually a landscape photographer i'm generally at home out in nature shooting mountains shooting snow in winter street photography it's not really my thing it's not what i do and i'm not particularly good at it but shooting on the streets of new york it did give me an idea of what this camera feels like to use because the intuitiveness of a camera is very important to me it's one of the things that attracted me to the fuji system in the first place i also got a really good idea of what the output's like the resolution how good the video is and most importantly whether this camera is worth investing in now in terms of the build quality this isn't a particularly small camera it's bigger than the xt4 and a little bit heavier as well at 660 grams it is quite a bit lighter than the original xh1 but it does feel quite large now that's not really that much of a problem uh it has a big grip so it feels really good in the hand i think a lot of people are going to like shooting with it because it does it is very easy to grip having this deeper grip makes it i think quite a lot easier to hold in something like the xt4 which has a much shallower grip and i spent days walking around new york with this just holding this in my hand and i never once felt tired it never once felt awkward it always felt good in the hand and was very easy to shoot with now in terms of the absolute build quality when i first started using it when i first opened the box i didn't feel that it felt as well constructed as something like the xt4 i'm not sure it just came out of the box that was like a first impression but after using it for quite a while that's kind of gone away it does feel really solid now it's been rained on quite a lot in new york i also use the xh2s in iceland and the xh2s has the exact same body as this that got rained a lot on there so the weather ceiling really does work i really put it through his but i put this for its paces i put the xh-2s through its pieces and i don't have any any doubts about the weather ceiling on the camera and it does feel really really solid it isn't as big a chunk of metal it doesn't feel as solid as something like the gfx but it is obviously a much smaller camera than that now both xh2 this one and the xh2s they share the same design language as cameras like the xs10 and cameras like the gfx in that they don't have all of the dials on top for controlling iso for shutter speed and exposure compensation there's just one psam dial here and most of the exposure controls are with the dial at the front or with the dial at the back here so it's a different language if you're really familiar with and you really like using cameras like the xt4 or the xt30 those kind of more like shall we say retro styled cameras this isn't going to feel as intuitive to switch to but if you've been using the xs10 or if you've been using the gfx a lot then it is very natural just kind of switch between those cameras and this you know i quite like the controls on this camera i've been using the xs10 and the gfx for a while now so this felt like a natural crossover to me it does feel like it fits very nicely beside those cameras one thing that i do miss is the front eye heel can control aperture and the back door controls uh shutter speed on the gfx you can click this dial in so this will then control the iso and then click it out again to control aperture now uh we asked fuji about that at the recent fujikina and they said the reason for losing the click on the front dial was that they felt that this was much faster to operate that you were less likely to accidentally click it and change controls that you didn't want to kind of take the point but it is something that i miss um so basically i've got aperture set up at the front shutter at the back and then you can see that there's a dial on the top you just click this and this gives you control to the iso with the with the dial at the rear it's not as nice as having immediate access to it as you do on a camera like the xd4 but it does work and it's not something that i found particularly problematic another thing that misses is a physical dial on the front or anywhere on the camera to control the focus mode manual focus or autofocus which is something i personally use a lot i like to switch between manual focus when i've got the camera on a tripod and autofocus if i'm handholding now again because so many of these dials and buttons are customizable you can easily set it up i've got it on this back button here so i just press this and then i can cycle through manual focus or autofocus so it is very quick and easy it's probably easier than actually turning the camera around and using the dial at the front but it's just something that i missed and something that i didn't notice when i first started using the camera so along the top you've got four buttons in a line you've got a front button at the front which basically allows you just to immediately start recording video then you've got a slightly larger iso button then a white balance button and then a custom mode button now on the back you've got the joystick here it's a slightly different joystick to what you get on the xt4 again much more similar to something that you'll find on the gfx it does fall quite nicely under the thumb i don't find it as easy to manipulate as something is the xt4 but it's not problematic when you're scrolling through the menus it's also got the d-pad so you can scroll you can scroll through the menus just as easily with the d-pad and all of these buttons are customizable and it does also have the flip out screen that you get on the xt4 and on the xs10 now i know this is quite a divisive thing i personally prefer the articulating screen that you get on cameras like the xt3 or that the gfx has i really do like that as a landscape photographer it works much better when you're using the camera on a tripod but if you're recording video being able to turn the camera around and record yourself makes things much easier like i'm doing now with the xs10 another thing that's noticeable about this is the card slots now traditionally on fuji's flagship cameras like the xt series you get two card slots this does have two card slots but one of those slots is for cf express so you don't have the dual sd cards anymore which means if you want to shoot uh with dual cards you're going to have to invest in a cf express card and they are at the moment quite a bit more expensive than sd cards like all memory i expect the prices will come down in a couple of years or so but right now it's an added expense now when i originally saw that on the xh2s i assumed that was because of the really high speed recording that that camera does but it is also on this and it's not necessary it's not particularly needed you can shoot 8k video in f log 2 onto an sd card i didn't try with the apple pro wrest i don't know if that's possible but for most of the users that i have i can use just the sd card but i do like having two cards it just makes things a lot easier for backup for security just for for convenience so it doesn't mean that i'm going to have to invest in a cf express card if i want to get the most out of this and one other thing worth noting for for people who shoot on a tripod with an l bracket like me is that fuji have moved the remote control connector to the other side to the same side as the camera of the battery which means that when you've got the camera and you've got an l bracket you can now you can plug the remote control in because before when the remote was on this side it kind of where the l bracket connected with tripod which made it absolutely impossible to use so that for me is a really nice touch the resolution on the electronic viewfinder has been increased to 5.76 million dots from 3.69 million dots on the xt4 so that means that this now has the same resolution viewfinder that you find in fuji's top top camera gfx 100 and a better resolution than you find in the gfx 100s which has the same resolution as the xt4 now this is noticeable when i was using it i did really notice it in the field the picture is just a little bit sharper there's a higher a little bit more detail it just feels a little bit crisper and it's something that actually felt quite nice fuji also claim they've increased the the in body camera stabilization to seven stops from six and a half stops now i'm not sure how much difference half a stop is going to make in terms of image stabilization and these things are very difficult to measure anyway but image stabilization is really good particularly on a camera with so much resolution on a camera that you're going to use a lot as a video and seven stops is quite a lot it should allow you to shoot handheld at shutter speeds of up to one over 200 so it does make a difference but how bigger improvement it is over something like the xt4 is something that i really don't know if i can measure or not now the battery is the same as the xt4 and the gfx100s but fuji are claiming that they've optimized it so you can get 10 more shots out of it so they're saying you can get 680 shots out of it as opposed to around 600 on the xt4 now again i did find the battery life really useful i was walking around new york shooting a lot we did a helicopter flight where i was shooting a lot shooting 4k video shooting 8k video shooting burst mode to test out the autofocus chimping a lot looking at the back of the screen and i managed to get through a whole day uh easily just on one battery it wasn't really a problem so battery life is really good for landscape shooters where i tend to shoot a lot less when i'm out in the field this battery is going to last me probably a couple of days before i'm going to have to recharge it now autofocus is big news in the new cameras in the xh2 and the xh-2s fuji are claiming that they've made quite a big improvement with it over cameras like the xt4 now it's hard for me to say because as a landscape photographer i mostly shoot in manual focusing with with with highlight peaking and when i do shoot with autofocus i'm generally not shooting fast moving subjects i don't really shoot action or anything like that however i put it through its paces a little bit and i was really amazed at how good it is it has different settings so you can set it for facial recognition you can set it to recognize animals or bikes or cars or buses and i found that it really was effective when you just touched the button it latched on and it really was very sticky it tracked the subject all the way across the screen whether they were coming towards me whether we were panning with them and pretty much nailed focus every single time i reached a point with this we were shooting auto focus when we're doing street photography i just didn't really worry about the focus anymore because i knew that it was going to nail it i knew that it was going to focus on pretty much what i wanted it to focus on and stay focused on that no matter how much the subject moved or how much i moved the camera so it really did make a big difference i'm not the right person to compare it with previous cameras and i certainly can't compare with other systems because i don't use other systems but i did feel that this was an excellent a really really really good autofocus system all right so what about the image quality in this camera it has a 40 megapixel cmos x-trans 5 hr sensor the 5 being for 5th generation and the hr being for high resolution and fuji claiming that it is the highest resolution in any aps-c camera now i don't know about that i can't speak for every other brand now 40 megapixels on an aps-c sensor is very high resolution it has a higher pixel density for example than something like the gfx 100s which has 100 megapixels but on a much bigger sensor so i was curious to see uh see what the resolution is like on this camera and also to see what the noise performance is like shooting low light with higher isos now in real world shooting that increased resolution translates as about 7 700 pixels along the longest edge which when it comes to printing if you're printing at 250 to 300 dpi or about 100 pixels per centimeter your prints are going to come out at about 77 almost 80 centimeters uh along the longest edge native prints which is quite a bit bigger than the 62 centimeters that you could get from the 26 megapixel sensor on the xt4 and i'm not very good at mass but that's about a 25 increase in print size along the longest edge which is significant for prints and of course the more resolution you have the more detail you have the easier it is if you want to up-raise your prints if you want to make them bigger using something like gigapixel so the more detail the better if you want to print large but whether you need that amount of resolution for your day-to-day shooting if most of you or if most of your work is just going onto the internet you probably don't really need 40 megapixels but it does give you a lot more detail to crop into and if you're just the kind of person that likes zooming into your images and looking at them at a hundred percent another thing that fujifilm have given this that before now only existed in the gfx is pixel shift technology where when the camera is on the tripod you can set it up to shoot 20 images and it will move the camera will move using the ibis system it will move the sensor a little bit in each direction and capture a very high resolution file it will actually quadruple the resolution giving you something like 160 megapixel images now that's great if you're shooting something like a still life or if you're archiving if you're shooting paintings or something like that in real world photography it it's not actually super useful because during the course of taking those 20 images anything that moves is going to be blurred so if you're shooting landscapes and there's grass moving or there's leaves moving or anything like that then you're going to get blood that you're not going to get detailed there you're just going to get blur so it's something when i've been using the gfx i've not found it super useful unless i'm shooting a scene where there's absolutely zero movement whatsoever which is quite rare for my kind of photography the other thing about having such a high resolution count is that not all fuji's lenses are optimized for it particularly not the older heritage lenses like the ones that came out at the beginning of the x system things like the 35 1.4 so fuji have been updating a lot of the lenses and there's a list on the website of what lenses are actually optimized to use this sensor now by optimize to use this sensor what that actually means is they will get you every bit of resolution that the sensor is capable of getting yeah you will be able to capture the lens the lens is also capable of matching it but that doesn't mean that you won't see a massive improvement with some older lenses if you're using something like the older 10 to 24 or something like even like the kit lens like the uh like the 18-55 you're not going to maximize it every pixel you're not going to get the best out of the sensor but you're still going to see a significant improvement you're still going to be shooting a 40 megapixel image but let's have a look now at what kind of images you can get of what the quality of the output is actually like so let's first have a look at the resolution of the camera now this is an image taken with the xh2 and this is an image taken with the 26 megapixel xs10 using the same lens and the same focal length so if we look at them both side by side you get an idea of what the difference in resolution is when you zoom in you can see how much bigger everything is on the camera with the with a higher megapixel count so over here we've got the xh2 and you can see this door for example or this car down here they're so much larger because they have so many there are so many more megapixels on each thing so you can zoom in a lot deeper and still keep the same level of detail now let's have a look at some of the detail that you get in the images when you zoom in so this is taken with the uh with the 20 with the 10 to 24 at 24 millimeter it's straight out of camera so it's the raw file it hasn't been sharpened hasn't been touched in any way and you start to see when you look deep into the image down here you look at the decel in the trees how much resolution there is how much detail you've got there's just so much going on in the image we can zoom in a little bit further and you can see here on the sign now if we were looking with 26 megapixel camera here we just simply wouldn't have the amount of detail now this is a handheld shot it's not on a tripod so it's not super sharp as i say i haven't done anything to it in post-processing but you really start to get an idea of how much detail is being resolved now this image is also taken at the base iso this is taken with the 70-300 which i think is a sharper lens in the 10-24 and you can see now this is a very tall skyscraper and i'm only at 165 millimeters here but you can see something so far away with a telephoto lens how you can pull it so close to you and get so much detail out of it we can see these out these cables here and a little bit of detail on the skyscraper now this is an image taken at a slightly higher iso it's taken from a moving helicopter above manhattan so we had to increase the iso a little bit try to keep a relatively fast shutter speed because the helicopter was moving and we didn't want to have too much movement blur and also shot wide open at f 1.4 on the new 23 millimeter f 1.4 now i've done a little tiny bit of work on this i've done a little bit of noise reduction and just pushed up the exposure a tiny little bit so i shot i did underexpose because i was trying to use a fast shutter speed and keep the um keep the movement blow down to an absolute minimum but you can see just with a little bit of work just with a little bit of noise reduction and pushing the exposure up this is a really good image i could certainly print this you could print this to about 60 centimeters wide and the amount of detail that's being resolved here in the streets with the cars from a wide-angle lens quite a long way away really is quite impressive this is a high iso image taken at iso 3200 with the 10 to 24 at f8 the camera it's not handheld i was kind of resting the camera on a on a wall kind of war here and you can see that there is definitely noise when we look into the shadows we look around the people here and in the corners if you look here you can start to see noise but overall this is a very good performance that's a relatively bright place grand central station there's not a lot of shadow detail there when you look in the shadows under here and particularly under here i guess you start to see some of the noise and some of the degradation of detail but overall for iso 3200 this is a very usable image this one is taken at iso 5000 same place the the same settings in the camera you can see again more noise starting to come here but again it's surprisingly usable around the people here on the floor in the shadows it is starting to break down i don't know if i'd really want to print this full size but it is very usable and i think that there is for me a little bit of an improvement over what i was getting with the xt4 now it comes to video i found the output to be absolutely outstanding as i've said before it shoots in 8k footage at up to 30 frames per second now obviously most people are not going to be using an 8k timeline but what ak gives you is the capacity to really crop deep into the videos and still keep 4k footage so basically it doubles the focal length of any lens you're using whether you're using a prime or a zoom you can just crop in a lot more and double your focal length and still keep 4k it shoots also in k again up to 30 frames per second and you've got 4k at up to 60 frames per second which allows you just to slow down the footage a little bit in terms of data transfer you're getting if you're using the cf express card it maxes out at 720 megabits per second on an sd card then your data transfer tops out at 200 megabits per second and also you've got all of the film simulations that you usually get on fuji cameras as well as f log f lock 2 and apple prores now these are low compression codecs which uh record a really large amount of data which gives you a huge amount of leeway when it comes to editing and grading the footage later on i shoot almost exclusively in f log i didn't really try out the apple prores because that really is a very high end codec i simply just don't need that level of quality for my own video footage overall then i think this is the biggest champ that the x system has made since the xt2 not just in terms of the resolution which is significant those 40 megapixels if you're shooting a lot of print work if you really need that high resolution then obviously that's going to make a big difference but the other features as well things like the 8k video which allows you to shoot which allows you to shoot and crop into the video allows you to really use a lot of stabilization on the video that you're shooting things like the massively improved autofocus system or just things like using the cf express card which can really speed up your workflow and the output from this camera both in terms of the still photos and the video is consistently excellent and i've been really really impressed with it now i do think that a lot of the xt4 owners are going to be looking at this camera and thinking whether they should upgrade or wait for the xd5 to come out next year or whenever that's going to be and it really is impossible to say fujifilm have made it clear that this is their flagship camera along with the xh2s so any xt5 isn't going to have features the top this but it is obviously going to have a lot of the features as fujios do a lot of the features from this a lot of the technology from this is going to be incorporated into the xt5 what i can say is that if you're looking for the best quality in terms of video output or in terms of still photography output then this is definitely the camera for you unless you're shooting really high speed then you might want to look at something like the xh2s but i think for most people for most kind of shooting this is going to be an excellent camera it doesn't have the stylings and design of something like the xt4 so if that's your thing then you might really want to wait for that but pretty much for everyone else this is an outstanding camera which has incredible output for pretty much all kinds of photography so i think that's it for this video i hope it's been interesting and i hope it's been useful if you've got any questions at all just drop them in the comment below or send me an email and i'll get back to you and if you're interested in my photography if you'd like to shoot with me then please check out my website i do workshops all year round next year i'll be going to namibia to greenland to iceland and i'd love to have you join me so you can find full information on all the workshops that i'll be running on my website or of course if they've got any questions just drop me an email i'd love to have you join me on a workshop and as ever good luck with all your photography thanks so much for watching and take care see ya [Music]

Channel: Andy Mumford

Views: 36,168

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Id: E9zbKZksrnc

Length: 22min 5sec (1325 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 18 2022