X100T: Some other things while we’re here

Since the original piece inadvertently left out a few items, here they are.

Effects of face recognition. The prolonged use of face recognition brings a few things to light:

• The X100T’s lens (essentially an unchanged X100 23mm f/2 lens) is much better close-up and wide-open than you might have been led to believe by using the focus-and-recompose method (which you will use if face detection fails).
• Face recognition (or more accurately, its confusion with two faces in-frame) encourages compositions either with one visible face or two in much different planes of focus.
• The problem, at least initially, is a conditioned inhibition from framing a face at the extreme left or right side of the frame.
• A profound sense of disappointment ensues when one considers that the face recognition of the original NEX-5 works faster and keeps working during video recording.

Electronic shutter. This feature takes advantage of the electronic front curtain function of the X-Trans II sensor. The upside is that you can now expose at ISO 3200 and f/2 during a nuclear explosion. The downside is that you cannot use flash to do it. In terms of actually needing a shutter that can fire for 1/32,000 of a second, there are virtually no such applications in real life. The real purpose of the electronic shutter is to cut shutter lag. Ordinarily, the X100-type shutter would have to close and then open to fire; with electronic shutter selected, it fires and then closes. There is a tiny bit of lag before the next shot, but this makes the camera much better at capturing the right moment (“decisive” for those who would pretend to be Catier-Bresson).

“Rolling shutter.” Granted, this can be a problem if you shoot F1 racing from the sideline on the straightaway, but there is no real rolling shutter issue with the X100T. This “problem” has been trotted out in quite a few online reviews, but it is very difficult to show in real life. In fact, the X100T shutter captures much faster than a normal SLR shutter (which typically scans a slit in 1/320 sec max) – so if your application were going to present an issue with the X100T, you would already have seen it on a DSLR.

Fuji WiFi vs. EyeFi. The Fuji internal system has a few advantages over EyeFi,

• It can automatically resize on the fly for transmission.
• It can select shots for transmission without having to trip the “protect” flag.
• It does not burn power to project a WiFi signal unless you specifically tell it to.
• It does not take so much work to get it to wake up to transmit.
• It does not dictate the maximum storage size of the camera.
• It does not physically fall apart or slow down/ jam up under heavy use.

On the other hand, EyeFi still has a few advantages up its sleeve:

• It can be moved between cameras.
• In connection with moving it, any camera you use it in will show up with the same SSID.
• It is better when you are shooting in a quasi-tethered manner (i.e., you want all photos to flow to a handheld) because it lets you use the camera like a camera. The Fuji requires its somewhat clumsy remote mode.

The nice thing is that you can use either system.

Exposure counter. What.the.hell? It’s bad enough that Fuji invented this on the GW and GSW cameras; it’s worse that people flip out over it when buying any used digital camera; and it’s worse yet that Fuji somehow decided to put a shot counter on the setup menu. And while we are reaching for superlatives, does someone have an explanation for why this is even a thing when according to the documentation, the counter is incremented by various operations that don’t even take pictures?

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