planalpha Offline Upload & Sell: Off
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So I received the X-E2 yesterday and haven't had too much time to test it out, but so far, I like it. Right off the bat just looking at the two side by side there are some obvious changes like the bigger screen and buttons have been moved a bit. I give those things a solid, "meh." Maybe I was just used to the old locations of the X-E1's buttons, but I never had any heartburn with them. To be honest, the more buttons you have the more things I accidentally push. The X-E1 struck just about a perfect balance between ease of access to common features and too much stuff to get in the way. Not a deal breaker, but just giving my initial impressions of my time with it. One thing I REALLY like is that I can select the highest sync speed of 180 on the shutter speed dial. Nice fix, Fuji! Going from +/- 2 stops to +/- 3 stops exposure compensation up time is nice too.
The Wifi is nifty but not stellar. Ya, you can geotag now and push photos off of it but it's a bit onerous to use. If they firmware the X-E2 to use your iPhone as a remote shutter release, that would be the bee's knees. Let's hope they backport that from the X-T1 soon.
Alright, now the good stuff, the reason I upgraded, the Auto Focus. There is a noticeable speed increase overall with the X-E2 which by itself wouldn't be worth the price to upgrade. But some of the new AF features certainly justified the cost to me. Face recognition is a great feature and seems to work faster than me moving the focus point around with the arrows but not quite as fast as hitting the eyes and recomposing, which has its own issues. Low light AF is also better but it seems that something with the sensor has better AF in low light at the center of the screen. For example, I set the focus point near the right side and couldn't get a backlit 3 year old in focus. It just wouldn't lock on despite all my attempts. Then I moved it to the center and boom! Locks right on. I was able to repeat that so it doesn't seem like an anomaly, rather how the PDAF pixels are located I didn't try it in continuous mode yet, but will have to play with it. The focus point is also a square whereas the X-E1 was a rectangle and pushing the center button would snap it back to the center focus point which was a nice shortcut that no longer exists on the X-E2.
I setup a couple of Speedlghts tonight, one with a Softbox III and the other with a little snoot and just snapped away at my little girl who never stops moving. With the X-E1 I would get a SD card of blurry, but I was very happy with how well the X-E2 did locking on to my maniac and getting a pretty high success rate of photos that were useable and sharp. Kudos to Fuji for their work on the AF improvements!
So, in summery, the new features of the X-E2 are great, but if you're on the fence about your X-E1, take the money and buy more glass unless you really need the faster AF. Otherwise be happy with the X-E1 and hold out for the X-E3.
For me, I'm glad I took the gamble and upgraded since it hit the big issues I had with the X-E1.
Hope this is helpful to anyone who is trying to get more info on what to do. I was pretty frustrated trying to get info on the practical differences between the two, not just spec sheet data, hence this post. Feel free to PM me if you have any questions.
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