TimeLine Media Blog

Washington, DC

I received a few emails about my recent posts about the X100s. It is a deceivingly good camera. Altough it has the form factor of a small, point-and-shoot camera, it has many of the controls of a larger camera, and can be just as complex to use. With the smaller body, many of the functions are more menu driven as there is just not that much space to add buttons or switches on the body. This can slow down your shooting if you have to change settings frequently, but they have tried to build in shortcuts. There are specific buttons that you can assign to settings that you access more frequently. The Fn button near the shutter release can change ISO settings very quickly in lieu of a dedicated ISO button on DSLR bodies.

Noise

Speaking of ISO and noise, this camera also has a big advantage over smartphone or point-and-shoot cameras. Behind the lens is a large APS-C sensor which is equivalent to the sensor size of many popular DSLR cameras. The larger the sensor, the better the low-light performance of the camera. A few have asked for some 100% crops of photos at the higher ISOs. Here is an example of the night time shoot at the Capitol building.

Even at 100%, the noise is not terrible especially considering the ISO is up to 800. This is also with the default noise reduction settings from Lightroom. If I were to print this image at a size higher than 16×20, I would have to do some more work, but at anything lower, the noise would not be viewable from a normal display distance. Another thing to note is that the photo above is sharp event at 100% with a shutter speed of 1/15^th! It is much easier to hand hold a smaller, lighter body at slower shutter speeds.

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