BIG TEST: Fujifilm X-H2

WORDS by WILL CHEUNG

Fujifilm is not a brand that rests on its laurels, and with the advent of its fifth-generation X-Trans CMOS sensor, you can bet there’ll be a series of new products heading our way.

The X-H2 is the second model to feature the new sensor, following the X-H2S we tested in the last issue. Put the two side by side and you’ll be hard-pushed to see any difference – that’s because they’re identical but for the name. They share the same weather-sealed, user-friendly body with an articulating touchscreen, 5.76-million-dot OLED EVF with the option of 120fps, five-axis in-body image stabiliser and a hybrid AF system with subject detection.

Check under the bonnet, though, and these two are very different. The X-H2S has a stacked 26.1-megapixel X-Trans CMOS 5 HS sensor and, coupled with the X-Processor 5, it’s very much about speed – both for stills and video. The same processing engine is used in the X-H2, but its sensor is a back-side illuminated 40.2-megapixel affair, which trumps the Canon EOS R7 by having the highest resolution currently found in an APS-C format camera.

There is also a price difference which reflects the cost of building a stacked sensor; the X-H2S sells at £2499 body only, the X-H2 is £1899.

 

Controls

Looking at the X-H2’s control layout, existing X Series owners will find the user experience different from what they’re used to. That’s not a negative – the X-H2’s layout is clean, but the top-plate is unlike the X-T3/4 and is more along the lines of the GFX 50S Mark II/100S. Gone are the three trinity dials – shutter speed, exposure compensation and ISO – so you can’t quickly glance down at the top-plate and check key settings.

Instead, a large sub-monitor may be configured to display a range of settings when the camera is powered up. Switched off, all you can see are battery condition, memory card status and how many frames are left, or the video record time remaining.

What you do get on the exposure mode dial are seven custom positions that can be assigned to stills or video shooting, and then your favoured settings may be saved as a preset. This is a definite time saver if your photography frequently takes you into situations where camera set-up varies, perhaps from shooting stills in the studio to landscapes, or footage for your YouTube channel.

This assumes you take a few minutes to set up each custom mode. By enabling the custom edit auto-update feature, if you forget something and change a parameter later then it’s memorised for future recall automatically.

The edit/save setting isn’t in the shooting set-up menu as you may expect, but the IQ menu  – which seems odd to me. There’s an option to rename the custom modes for easy reference, though the names are only seen in the edit/save custom mode menu itself, not the monitor, sub-monitor or EVF. As a memory aid, you could stick a note on the back of the camera to remind you what each setting is for.

As usual with Fujifilm, the X-H2 is highly customisable. There are seven function buttons and four touch settings, plus seven control buttons such as Q, AF-ON and AE-L that could be changed from their default purposes. Versatility is remarkable – with 65 options for the touch settings and 76 for the buttons.

Bursting into action

As previously mentioned, the X-H2S is all about speed. It can rip through full-format Raws at 40fps and keep that pace for quite a while, especially with a CFexpress Type B card on board. By comparison, the X-H2 is more sedate, but will still easily satisfy most photographers.

Set the X-H2 to continuous high-speed shooting with the electronic shutter, and the claimed rate is 20fps with a 1.29x image crop. The fastest uncropped rate is 13fps. With a Manfrotto CFexpress Type B card in tow, I kept my finger on the shutter button for a minute, getting around 1200 lossless compressed Raws – so it achieved the headline 20fps throughout that burst.

Switching to mechanical shutter, I got 15fps and 960 full-format Raws without hesitation – and could have carried on. In both modes, the buffer cleared almost as soon as I took my finger off the shutter button.

Switching to an SD card – a ProGrade with 250MB/s write speed – I got 100 full-size Raws at 15fps and 133 shots at 20fps with the 1.29x crop before the camera paused for breath, and the buffer took around 20 seconds to clear. So, while the X-H2 is not as rapid as its stablemate, it is still very capable.

If you’re a fan of action shooting, the X-H2’s top electronic speed is an incredible 1/180,000sec available in single frame and a shooting rate of 13fps. The top speed of the X-H2S and other X models is 1/32,000sec.

A shift in quality

A first for X Series cameras is the Pixel Shift Multi-Shot mode, taking the camera’s 40.2-megapixel resolution up to 160 megapixels. A static scene and dependable tripod are essential and there is no lower-resolution handheld version. Fujifilm does have the feature on its GFX System with its conventional Bayer 2×2 pixel array. However, providing the feature on the X Series is more complex with its X-Trans sensors
that feature a 6×6 pixel array.

The mode is available through the camera’s Drive menu. Once selected, IS switches off and lossless Raws are the only image quality choice. It works only with the camera’s electronic shutter and within an ISO 125-1600 range. All this underlines its intended use – for ultimate quality and digital archiving purposes.

Twenty shots are taken (compared with 16 on GFX cameras) with a single press of the shutter release. First, five shots are taken with a one pixel shift in each direction, then the process repeats four times with 0.5 pixel shift after each burst.

In our test, we found X-H2’s Pixel Shift Multi-Shot mode very impressive, producing large and incredibly detailed files, just as advertised. It is not a feature most users will need, especially when you consider the potential of the X-H2’s native resolution, or that you need a tripod and static subject.

I shot tests indoors, but also ventured outdoors, trying the mode on buildings and a few scenics on a very still evening where, to my eye, nothing was moving. There was a problem with one of the scenics and combiner software merged the 20 shots, but I got a ‘defect detected’ message. The merged shot opened, and it looked like there was a tiny movement in a few leaves – these were blurred, but the rest of the scene was sharp. The other shots merged fine, though, so scenics are a possibility but must remain absolutely static.

Focused performance

I had several lenses to use on the X-H2, including the 18-120mm f/4 power zoom, the new XF56mm f/1.2, the original XF10-24mm f/4, XF16-55mm f/2.8 and the XF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6. I used the latter to see how the X-H2’s IBIS system fared. In my tests at 400mm, even at 1/12sec shutter speed I got four out of five acceptably sharp shots, which was highly impressive.

Autofocus was reliably accurate and quick. On only a few occasions did I have to lend a hand. Just for instance, I was trying the 50cm minimum focusing distance of the XF56mm f/1.2 lens and the spot AF did not detect a rose hip in shot. Subject detection could be less surefooted too, if the subject was small in the frame, and I found that with birds and planes when using the XF100-400mm zoom. As always with advanced AF systems, camera set-up needs fine-tuning and tweaking for consistent performance.

In other key aspects, I thought the X-H2 behaved impeccably, with good exposures, reliable white-balance and impressive digital noise levels. As for the X-H2’s resolution, there’s clearly huge potential for superb-quality imagery and cropping.