I’ve read a lot of X-T1 reviews, but there are only a couple that I think are well rounded enough for people to read.
The first is by Michael Reichmann at Luminous Landscape. One part that he dislikes on the X-T1 — which I hadn’t considered — is the lack of custom control settings:
Many, if not most cameras these days have grouped custom settings. This allow a wide range of desired settings to be combined into a single setting and this then assigned to a custom function button. That’s the way I always work. I have at least two custom settings, one for everyday walk-around shooting and one for a situation such as illustrated above, where I need settings appropriate for fast action. The geese may fly by, there could be a fight across the street, a scaffolding is falling off a construction site – press a single button and you’re ready to capture the shot.
I think this is a strong point, but the same complaint could be made of using a manual focus lens. It’s a limitation of the style of the camera, not so much the camera — and therefore it is a choice the user makes. I think that just makes his point a ‘thing’ and not so much a detracting feature. Certainly an important ‘thing’ though.
Steve Huff also posted his review and he is typically hard on Fujifilm, but not so much this time. His review I find to be fairly accurate and nothing sticks out at me as “hey, that’s wrong”. Having said that I don’t like the way he compared the noise between the X-T1 and the E-M1. ((These fucking camera names are going to be the death of us.)) I specifically don’t like that he is comparing the JPEGs and not the RAW files — now the X-T1 isn’t supported yet by a lot of software, so that could be the reasoning, but still.
Personally I think Fujifilm has the best noise control of any camera on the market today — and I am not the only one. However Huff mentions that the JPEG noise reduction can cause “issues”. I know what he means, as I could only use X-T1 JPGs for my testing, this 1-month photo of our daughter looks overly smooth in the skin because of that noise reduction. So while I personally think the X-T1 bests the E-M1 in noise control by a strong margin, I do agree that I wish noise reduction could be turned off.