Fujifilm XT5 Review (after 6 months of use)

this is the Fujifilm xt5 camera which I have been using for six months and I'm finally going to tell you what I think [Music] hi everyone welcome to Pal to Tech it's been 10 years since the first xt-1 was released and with each new model more advanced technology was added with the same basic ergonomics the xt4 was sort of a spin-off in a different direction but we'll talk about that in a bit so really the xt5 picks up right where the xt3 left off today's video is not sponsored I paid for this camera myself and I bought it the day it was released however I did not want to make a review until I was satisfied that I had done all the testing that I thought was important for my viewers now a quick note before we begin I shot all of my images in the highest image quality and full resolution of the xt5 sensor I used both the 40 megapixel optimized lenses as well as the regular fujinon lenses with the camera and everything has been updated with the latest firmware as of the date of this video I chose to process the raw files for this review in Lightroom and that's because Lightroom is the editing software that is most used by my viewers however I also tested in Capture One dxo pure raw and luminar AI remember that when D Mosaic in Fujifilm raw files the quality can vary significantly across editing programs the xt5 was released this past November and it includes the 5th generation x-trans CMOS sensor and processor which is the same one that Fujifilm released with the xh2 camera this new processor brings in all new autofocus algorithm that includes more advanced face eye and subject detection that was built into the xh2 by far the most significant change in this camera is the new 40 megapixel sensor and the lower base minimum ISO of 125. we'll get into image quality in a little bit but having a much larger sensor and a higher resolution does sort of affect the way that you shoot and edit photos with your camera as far as all the specs and the features packed into this camera I am not going to just list all of the camera specs here in this video instead I really wanted to approach this video as someone coming from an xt4 or an xt3 and wondering if they should upgrade to this model not only that but I have a message for new Fujifilm users as well which I will go over in my conclusion at the end of this video you'll notice right away that when you pick up an xt5 for the first time it is smaller and lighter than the xt3 and the xt4 if you include a battery and a memory card it only weighs 557 grams which is 50 grams less than the xt4 the camera body itself is made of magnesium alloy and it is weather sealed regarding the smaller size though you should know that there is no battery grip for this camera so if you like larger cameras you're going to either need to get a camera cage or the optional hand or thumb grip but hold on before you do that I must tell you that despite the overall smaller size of this camera the native built-in grip has been extended outward and it feels absolutely great I've been using this camera with the 50 to 140 millimeter lens as well as the heavy 16 to 55 millimeter and overall it feels solid in my hand if you look at the grip on the xt3 you can see how much smaller it was and it caused at least for me my hands to feel uncomfortable after holding the camera for long periods of time this is much less of an issue with the xt5 and honestly I probably will never buy another XT line Fujifilm camera that doesn't have a grip more like the xt5 the front of the camera is almost identical to the earlier models and of course you get that extremely helpful Focus mode dial exactly where it should be on the left side there's solid plastic doors covering two sections of ports the top area contains the microphone and remote release Port while the bottom is a micro HDMI and USB charging and data transfer Port unfortunately unlike the xt3 you can't really remove the doors which I think it's a step backwards you see how they were one of the first things that I removed on my xt3 as I constantly access these ports of course most of you probably don't need to do that the other side of your camera are your dual SD card slots there's no CF Express slot like the xh2 has as only SD card storage and this does affect buffer size and write out speeds which I'll get into in a little bit the camera uses the exact same battery as the xt4 which is awesome you get about 550 or so shots on a single battery if you are coming from an xt3 right once you start using these larger batteries you will never and I mean never want to go back to the smaller ones in older XT models that had just a spit of power in them the top of the camera is outstanding and it's everything we love about Fujifilm the dials sound a little bit different than the ones on the xt3 have a listen the additional dial right here at the bottom of the iso dial is slightly harder to move which is a good thing because it prevents accidental turning the still movie Switch below the shutter speed dial was first introduced in the xt4 and like the larger battery once you have this thing you will never want to go back it makes switching from Stills to video mode very fast however it does come at a cost and that is the loss of the photometry setting dial which you now have to go into a menu or assigned to a custom button about that still movie dial though if you've never had one on a Fujifilm camera before you need to know that there is some Crossover with regard to menu items as some movie settings do appear when the camera is in Stills mode while the full set of video options appear when you switch the dial over to movie mode I've got several tutorial videos on this very subject planned so new users can understand what's what in the meantime just know that when you put it into movie mode that's when you get every possible option for video shooting in your menu the function button that was between the shutter speed and exposure compensation dials on the xt3 has been moved to the top right corner near the shutter release button and actually think that that's a little bit better for one-handed use you can reach it just like this on the back the button placement is pretty much the same as the xt4 for anyone upgrading from an xt3 there's some things that you'll need to get used to the Q button is now to the right of the command dial having been swapped out for the auto exposure lock button there are two fairly important ergonomic changes for xt3 and xt4 users to know about the first is how you format your SD card previously you pressed and held down on the trash can button and then quickly pressed in the command dial but on the xt5 you have to hold down the trash can button and then press and hold down the command dial both buttons at the same time and then keep them both pressed for a few seconds I'm not kidding one 1000 thousand two one thousand boom and then you'll see the format menu appear the second change to be aware of is the joystick previously if you wanted to change the size of your focus point or move it around you pressed in on the joystick just like a button then you were able to move around and edit your focus point however pressing in on the focus stick doesn't do anything on the xt5 instead you have to first initially move the joystick around in any direction and that will then put you into Focus Point edit mode that takes some mental brain reworking if you're used to the xt3 or the xt4 the good news is that you can actually edit that Focus stick Behavior put your camera in Stills mode just like this go into the little wrench area of the menu under button dial setting you see where it says Focus lever setting here you can change what pushing or tilting the focus stick does and you have some options and finally regarding ergonomics we come to the rear three inch LCD screen the xt4 to the shock and dismay of some photographers got rid of that three-way tilt screen and the xt5 brought it right back but whether or not you like this change all depends on the type of shooting that you do I think that for most photographers this is a welcome return to form the camera also features improved Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity the electronic viewfinder is now 0.8 times magnification at 3.69 million dots it runs at 100 frames per second blackout free I also noticed during my use that the camera responded faster when it was switching from electronic viewfinder to the LCD screen looking through here back out to here the cameras seem to switch faster let's talk about the shutter the shutter on the Fujifilm xt5 gives you up to 500 000 cycles of durability you can set the mechanical shutter to go all the way down to 1 8 000 of a second if you want and if you need faster shutter speeds you can switch over to the electronic shutter which allows for up to 180 thousandths second you've also got electronic front curtain shutter and several combinations of electrical and mechanical shutter to handle just about any possible shooting situation compared to the xt3 I think the shutter on the xt5 sounds a bit different have a listen foreign shutter can shoot up to 15 frames per second if you switch over to the electronic shutter you can get up to 20 frames per second but that comes with a 1.29 times crop factor if you are coming into this camera from the xt3 you are absolutely going to love having Ibis especially if you shoot video Ibis opens up a whole new world of lenses that normally you wouldn't be able to use handheld for video shooting for example here's a comparison with the xt3 shooting video using the 16 millimeter prime lens it's not even almost a close call and not only that when shooting video you're given even more features to stabilize your footage such as Digital Image stabilization however in order to make digital image stabilization work you actually are limited to the kind of resolution that you can shoot for example if you put the camera into 4K HQ mode the ability to add digital stabilization is grayed out you see that but regardless of the lens or the resolution setting you always have the option to put the camera in is mode boost as far as Stills are concerned the Ibis unit allows you to shoot photos handheld at lower shutter speeds the cameras Ibis unit allows for up to seven stops of image stabilization let me show you what I mean this image was shot here with a 23 millimeter prime lens with Ibis turned on my shutter speed was 1 30th of a second and I held the camera just like this obviously zooming into 100 it looks pretty good let's now go down to 1 15 of a second have a look at this pretty impressive and now down to 1 8 of a second again this is really a usable image and check this out half a second and finally we have one second we're talking one second here and yeah we're definitely getting a little bit of blur this is still a usable image if you look at it backed out obviously at 200 percent yeah but one hundred percent and this would still be a usable image if you cropped back here and you know share this on social media or something I mean we're talking one second of shutter speed here that's Ibis a cautionary tale to some of you photographers out there that are new to Ibis if you are shooting at lower shutter speeds relying on the camera's Ibis will not help you to prevent motion blur it only affects Camera blur okay so if you're shooting at you know speeds like 1 30th of a second or slower your subject is not going to be in Focus even when using Ibis onto a very important subject and that is autofocus the xt5 includes a 100 phase detection autofocus area with 3.33 million phase detection autofocus pixels so is the autofocus better on the xt5 than it is on the xt3 or the xt4 yes it is especially with regard to face eye Auto detect assuming you're not in very low light situations or low contrast it Nails a fairly big majority of the shots for video autofocus same thing I noticed a big improvement over the xt3 in fact here they are side by side you see the difference here between the xt5 and the xt3 all of the settings on the camera are the same AFC was the focus mode and I had face eye Auto detection turned on while there are some issues that I'm going to get into in a second I want to be clear that the autofocus on the xt5 is great and it's vastly improved from earlier models I've discovered that the best way to improve your autofocus focus on the xt5 is to really teach yourself everything about two critical settings of this camera AFC custom settings and using the correct auto focus mode so many people fail to do this and it really makes a huge difference in unlocking the camera's ability to accurately nail the focus remember the camera has no idea what you're shooting you've got to give it as much information as possible at one point I actually made an entire video going over exactly how to best set autofocus modes on the xt3 soon I'm going to update that and I'm going to release a special one for the xt5 one of the major changes to autofocus on the xt5 is the new subject detection feature you can choose animal bird automobile bike airplane or train when you do that you will often set your camera's auto focus mode to either wide tracking or zone now I don't want to get into too much educational content here today as this is a review video but I must say if you are using subject detection and you have your focus mode set to AFS then the camera will always be tracking your subject when you are not half pressing the shutter release button as soon as you half press the shutter release button the camera will stop tracking your subject so be careful with this because if you delay taking your shot your subject could move out of your depth of field and it will no longer be in Focus however if you have your focus mode set to AFC then the camera will continue to track your subject even when you are half pressing down the shutter release button subject detection itself is actually one of the most interesting parts of the xt5 for me the animal setting works great for four-legged animals such as dogs or even deer now when I switch to wide tracking it sometimes missed a few and I found interestingly enough that having a larger Zone area and then combining that with bird detection works very well because you can move that zone around if you need to a word of warning however if you have it in bird or animal or whatever subject detection don't forget to take it out of that mode if you're out trying to shoot humans in fact I found the subject recognition algorithm to be very accurate look here at how it instantly recognized and locked onto the dog even though the human was right next to her and both were moving around in fact I went to a lot of trouble to fool this camera and sometimes I was able to make it struggle as you can see here showing only part of this bird and obviously it was having trouble locking on also subjects that are sort of silhouetted and not real discernible it struggles with more that if you flip the camera around to the other side where you have the light on the subject but and this was a surprise if you put subject detection in bird mode and then you aim the camera at a turtle it will nail it perfectly I mean have a look at this I mean if you consider what's all in this scene for the camera to instantly recognize that turtle out way out there in the back that was pretty pretty impressive so there you go the First Youtube channel to tell you how to best focus on a turtle overall I found that bird mode was actually the best and most accurate in recognizing the largest variety of animals look at this here it knew to focus on who was the boss the parents face eye detection on objects moving toward the camera wasn't bad either I'd say it's about as good as the xt4 and maybe a bit better than the xt3 remember that with any autofocus test the lens you use is a huge factor in the performance now during the course of my testing with subject detection in particular I noticed some false positives where the green squares right in the viewfinder were showing clearly green you know when it was going one green square right after the other and I thought okay good I've nailed all the shots I'm awesome however when I got into Lightroom that wasn't the case they weren't all perfectly in Focus like I thought when I saw all the green squares so maybe for some reason the camera has some kind of a micro delay and fully talking to the shutter that millisecond that I saw the focus green appear in the display look I could be way off on this and I will be the first to admit that I don't have a camera laboratory here to run Advanced testing on what I will say is that what I just described didn't happen that often and generally only occurred when the subject detection mode was on AFC so take my observation about this for what it's worth overall I would say that for many photographers the xt5s autofocus is good enough however it still feels to me like an auto focus Improvement firmware updater 2 would be a hugely welcome Improvement particularly if you're shooting wildlife in lower light conditions let's talk about ISO performance with regard to noise and color shifting overall the xt5 handles ISO very well up to about 3200 then your results can vary depending upon your subject so here we are at ISO 800 and it looks great moving up to 1600 it still looks great even at 3200 and here I'm a hundred percent it looks really good if I zoom into 200 percent and I start pixel peeping yeah I'm going to see some noise and a bit of loss of detail but still overall it looks very good here we are at 6400. let's zoom in at 100 percent definitely some more noise but still you know we're looking at a color chart here if you look at a regular subject it's harder to see that noise going in at 200 percent now yeah you can definitely start to see that noise but you're still getting some fairly decent detail where it starts to fall apart as about 12 800. have a look at this zoomed in at 200 percent yeah not great and then jumping to the extended ISO of twenty five thousand six hundred you know it's it's pretty bad although if you pull back out you know social media why not and just for fun flipping over to 51 200 I'm zoomed in at 200 percent here and yeah lots of noise now looking at some real life shots here let's zoom in to 200 and we are at ISO 1250 and it still retains a good amount of detail now let's take a look at a bird shot at 6400 200 percent zoomed in yeah loss of detail for sure you see that right there however we now live in a new era of Photography and photo editing software with built-in AI is arriving at a very fast pace and it can really help to bring down the noise level in those raw files it's not perfect but certainly better and I could have improved it more by spending more time with the settings of the editing software let's take a look now at the iso noise on an xt4 when compared with an xt5 here we are at 6400 xt5 is on the left xt4 on the right if I zoom into 200 percent yeah it appears that the xt5 is noisier right on first glance but you have to take into account the sensor size and the cropping that you may be doing if I zoom out to try and match it there you see that we're about right at the same kind of Zoom magnification of both you'll see here now the xt4 is seems noisier let's try it at 12 800. zooming in yeah seems a bit noisy there and then pulling back out slightly on the xt5 to try and match the magnification I do notice at 12 800 on the xt5 there is more color shifting but only at that level of high ISO so I have just one word for the image quality on this camera outstanding on the xt5 you get their wonderful 19 included film simulations and those beautiful straight out of camera jpegs the detail you get when you zoom in is wonderful the film simulations including the addition of nostalgic negative are everything that you would expect and work wonderfully with the larger sensor and the xt5 really does take it to the next level with that 40 megapixel sensor it gives you more detail and thus more freedom to crop in and I'm finding myself as I'm out and about shooting that I am worrying less about needing to get quite as close up I just know that I can crop in a bit later on and there's really not much more I can say here you either use Fujifilm and know exactly what I'm talking about with how good their jpegs are or you're just getting started and in that case you're in for a real treat regarding dynamic range I found the dynamic range to be similar to the xt4 so in this shot we have the area in the window at exactly proper exposure according to the camera Here We Are One Stop Overexposed two stops three stops four five six and seven let's start with seven stops Overexposed let's try and bring down our highlights and maybe our exposure zoom in nothing seven stops Overexposed forget it it's gone you're never gonna get it back let's now go to six stops same thing highlights down maybe a little down on the exposure boom oh I see a little something it's not gonna work either with six how about five stops okay we're starting to see something here but it's not really that good no to that one either and now we go to four stops here it is without any adjustment at four stops Overexposed and now let's bring the highlights down all the way boom okay that's something definitely more detail you see that there's before and after and now three stops Overexposed same thing bring down the highlights and as I said this is pretty much on par with the xt4 with larger 40 megapixel sensors comes big responsibility I'm talking about two aspects of this file size and buffer size let's talk about file size first the highest quality jpegs from the camera that are 7728 by 5152 pixel resolution are about 13 megabytes each you also have the option to shoot in heif format instead of JPEG but this file format is not recognized by a lot of applications and I don't recommend it for the raw files a full uncompressed raw gives you 84 megabytes each while choosing lossless compressed knocks it down by more than half at 36 megabytes and finally you can choose compressed raw which lowers it only a bit further to about 27 megabytes I have found literally no difference in quality between lossless compressed raw and uncompressed raw interestingly when I compared compressed raw with uncompressed raw I noticed the addition of some purple infringing that was weird and I cannot say for certain that it was caused solely because of the file format unfortunately I didn't have time to further test this before the video was completed so assume that I probably screwed something up in this test somewhere the bottom line here is that storage is getting cheaper all of the time and for what it's worth I found that shooting in jpeg fine plus lossless compressed raw files gives me the best number of options to both edit and share my photos as well as future proof them with future improvements to software demosaicing larger files means larger amounts of data that the camera has to write out to the SD cards and because of this the camera's buffer is going to fill faster than it would on a camera with a smaller 26 megapixel sensor if you shoot at the largest file size uncompressed raw plus jpeg you're going to get about 19 frames before you fill the buffer using mechanical shutter that number goes up to about 23 frames if you're using the electronic shutter now either way you you can slightly more than double that buffer time if you shoot compressed raw plus jpeg so it all depends on what your shooting needs are and your settings but this begs the question is this a good match for professional Wildlife or sports high action photography well if buffer size is important to you I would seriously look into the xh2 lineup instead since they use CF Express cards and those offer faster write-out speeds Fujifilm themselves have stated that this is a photography first camera so what about video well I'm pleased to say that the xt5 does bring some nice improvements as well as a few restrictions to video shooting I plan on making an entire separate series of videos on shooting video with the xt5 so I am not going to get into all of the video features here however let's go through a few highlights you get up to 6.2 K 30p video at 422 10 bit that can be recorded internally at 360mps per second however the 6.2 K is only available in the 16x9 aspect ratio and it will have a 1.23 times crop factor you can also record out via HDMI 6.2 K 30p 422 12 bit in f-log 2 prores raw or Blackmagic raw F log 2 will give you 13 stops of dynamic range which is a full stop of improvement over the xt4 now you get up to 90 minutes of record time shooting at 6.2 KP at room temperature but only 17 minutes at 40 Celsius for 4K 60p it's 60 minutes and 18 minutes respectively I found that the image stabilization works better on the xt5 than it did on the xt4 particularly with regard to is boost mode that's what I like to call handheld video shooting tripod mode have a look here at the difference between turning on is boost mode and having it off there is just better overall stab stabilization compensation on this camera the 4K video quality is excellent and there's a new Mode called 4K HQ and that is where the camera shoots in 6.2 K and then it down samples to 4K there's a little bit of difference between 4K and 4K HQ but what I found so interesting was comparing 4K HQ to 6.2 K have a look at this the 4K HQ looks pretty darn good and very similar to the 6.2 K quality and right here I'm zoomed in about 400 percent now because the larger sensor is causing the readout speed to be lower that does bring the increased risk of rolling shutter Distortion in my testing I did not notice much of a problem with rolling shutter however if rolling shutter does concern you I do recommend that you consider the xh2 camera for professional filmmaking work there's many other features of the xt5 that I just didn't have time to get to today mostly because I wanted to at least try and keep this video to a reasonable length and also because some of these subjects deserve their own tutorial videos some of the main ones include 160 megapixel shift multi-shot the various bracketing and filter settings and the digital teleconverter which is actually a very cool feature and one for an upcoming video now we come to the most important part of this video and actually the portion that I spent the most time working on and thinking about I'm going to approach this by talking about several different groups of photographers and filmmakers and for each what I recommend the first are professional video shooters that need a serious video camera and the important ergonomics and features that go with it into this category I'll also add professional Wildlife or Sports photographers basically anyone that needs deeper camera buffers and faster performance particularly with autofocus in low light conditions or needing sustained bursts of images of fast moving subjects for this group my recommendation is not to get the xt5 but instead get an xh2 or an xh2s for the additional money you're going to have increased buffer sizes faster readout speeds using CF Express cards higher resolution video options and features like a full-sized HDMI port headphone jack and a fully articulating screen I'm not saying you can't shoot Incredible video with an xt5 because you certainly can but if you need to take this to the next level video or perhaps you're concerned about rolling shutter or higher resolutions or raw video and you don't really care about these dedicated exposure triangle dials on the top definitely check out the xh2 and the xh2s they are designed exactly for those kinds of needs the next group are photographers who shoot some video and currently own either an xt2 or an xt3 for all of you I would say that it is absolutely worth upgrading to the xt5 the autofocus is better having Ibis is a game changer for video and the 40 megapixel sensor really does give you more detail in your images but ironically I think you'll find that Above All Else improved battery life is one of the best reasons to upgrade and I think that this is absolutely a worthy upgrade from the xt3 and I highly recommend it if your budget allows it particularly if you're shooting video as well next we come to the most difficult group of all the xt4 owners I myself was in this group when the xt5 was released the xt4 ended up improving a lot over the xt3 including autofocus it also has Ibis and the same battery as the xt5 which is a huge deal and lastly it does have this fully articulating screen even Fujifilm themselves poked fun in looking back at the release of the xt4 dear Fujifilm get your video out of my photography mostly because it was such a radical shift and a different direction from the xt2 and the xt3 so if you are an xt4 owner and you do love the articulating screen you might seriously want to put some thought on whether or not you want to upgrade to the xt5 because once you've gotten used to it going back to the three-way tilt screen can be quite a change and for our final group those of you who are new to the Fujifilm camera system should you get an xt5 the answer is depends on your budget the xt3 which you can get a used model much cheaper is an almost identical camera from an ergonomic standpoint and if you're new to the Fujifilm system features like exposure control dials camera menus Focus modes and many other aspects are identical let me tell you something the xt3 is an outstanding camera to begin with and to learn on try it out and if you fall in love with the fujifilms system like so many of us have by that time perhaps you can pick up a used xt5 or even an xt6 I think what I'm trying to say here and I'm speaking to everyone now is that when the xt3 came out it already had more features than I ever thought that I would need in a camera it opened up all kinds of doors for photography and video shooting and image quality that I fell in love with Fujifilm is so much more about the feeling and the joy of using a camera to create something special and you too can have that incredible experience even if you don't have the latest and the greatest the xt3 is fine so is the xt2 and so it goes that being said though if you have the budget it's a small camera with big pictures and it has the soul of film in a digital world I cannot recommend it enough I really want to thank you all for watching this video today and in particular all of you who waited patiently this long period of time for me to make this review and especially I want to thank my backstage and YouTube channel members who make this channel possible thank you in the meantime I hope you found the video helpful or at least entertaining and if you did be sure to give it the like And subscribe I will be signing off now but have a wonderful weekend and I will see you in a video next week take care [Music] thank you

Channel: pal2tech

Views: 295,533

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Id: NbGg4rMKVfU

Length: 33min 38sec (2018 seconds)

Published: Sun May 07 2023