Fujifilm X-S10 - A Practical Comparison with the X-T4 & X-T30

This is the Fuji X-S10. It's Fuji's latest 26 megapixel APS-C camera and it kind of marks a slight change in direction and it's slightly different from all of the previous X system cameras in that they've abandoned the traditional retro styling and analog controls that you found on the previous cameras and gone for much more kind of traditional and simplified layout. Now it doesn't really have an obvious predecessor in the lineup. It's kind of like the X-T4 in most of its specifications except it's considerably smaller and it's kind of like the X-T30. It has the same image sensor of the X-T4, the X-T3, the X-T30 and the X-Pro3 but what it does have that the X-T30 doesn't have is image stabilization built into the body and it's a very different shape and feels like a very different camera to the X-T30. So it seems to me that Fuji are very definitely pitching this at video makers and people new to the Fuji system. Now it's surprisingly small and light. That was the first thing that I noticed when I took it out the box. It's really not that much different from the X-T30 when you put them side by side. It's a little bit longer across the body. The main body, the top plate is lower although when you take into account the flash bulge it's about the same. What surprises me most is that it has the same thickness which is interesting because this has as I said the image stabilization which was something that Fuji they originally introduced it in the X-H1 which was a really big bulky camera and then the X-T4 which while it's more or less the same as the X-T3 you still feel a lot of the thickness in the body. So for Fuji to have scaled the stabilization down even more to put it in a body this thin is really quite impressive and it does feel very light. Now it's a little bit heavier than the X-T30 in 82 grams but you're really not going to notice a difference. It really does feel very light and with this big grip on the side it feels very good in the hands. Now as I said this has been designed I think for video users for holding it with one hand for shooting video handheld and it does kind of feel better than the X-T30 which has this very shallow grip and I've always loved I've always loved these cameras but one of the things about them is that you know I found that my my finger would kind of wave around the bottom I couldn't really get a very good grip on it. That's not really a problem with the X-S10 it really does feel very good in the hand your hand wraps right around it and it's it feels very good to use. Now in comparison with the X-T4 it really is significantly smaller and lighter which is impressive considering it has the same image processor the same sensor and pretty much the same image stabilization. On the X-T4 you've got 6.5 stops of stabilization and scaling this down this goes down to just six stops so you lose half a stop of image stabilization but I think that's kind of compensated for the fact that it is so much smaller and it's so much lighter. What you don't get is the battery from the X-T4 it's got this much deeper grip and I was kind of hoping that it would have the same bigger battery that the X-T4 has got which gives it a much longer which gets a lot more shots out of one charger but it doesn't it has the same battery as the X-T30 the X-T3 and because of the IBIS you do lose a little bit in terms of the number of shots that you can get I think it's graded for 310 shots as opposed to 380 on the X-T30 so battery life is going to suffer for the IBIS. Now it's also got the same flip out screen as the X-T4 which in my experience splits opinion among photographers. Some people really love it because they shoot a lot of videos and they like to be able to see themselves while they're shooting it for vlogs. I'm using the same thing on the X-T4 to record this video now and it really does help but if you're not interested in shooting vlogs then a lot of people really don't like this they find it it sticks out it's not as easy to use as the articulating screen on things like the X-T3 however it does I mean you get more articulation it's got more flexibility than the articulated screen on the X-T30 which only goes horizontally it doesn't articulate vertically whereas this does it's exactly the same as the X-T4 screen. Now originally when I did the X-T4 video L brackets were a little bit of a problem finding an L bracket that would work with the flip out screen but eventually third-party systems came out and that's not really a problem now it's not perfect but you can get L brackets that work with this flip out screen. I think the biggest difference that people are going to notice between this and other cameras in the X system lineup are the complete change of controls. I've been using the Fuji system for about five years and I really do like the analog dials I really do like having the the ISO on a dial the shutter speed on a dial the aperture on the lens on the front and I've got completely used to that and it's second nature very intuitive for me to use now this doesn't have that it's very different in the way that it operates and that's taken me a while to get used to how to overcome my muscle memory and things that were previously automatic I find myself having to think about them more with this camera it's the first camera that I've seen in the Fuji X system lineup that has aperture priority shutter priority things like that now those functions were available on the other cameras you just access them in different ways if you wanted a shutter priority for example then you would just set the the aperture ring to auto if you wanted aperture priority then you just would set the shutter dial to auto and it worked in that way this way it's much more direct which in it is simpler that's why Fuji have done it they're trying to I think make the camera more comfortable to beginner users to make it much more easy to step into if you haven't been using the Fuji system and I can see that that does work it's just as someone who's coming from other Fuji cameras it took me about half a day to get my head around how this works differently so working my way through the controls over here on the left this is where you have the function dial on the on the X-T on the X-T30 and on the on the larger cameras the X-T4, X-T3 it's the ISO dial here this just basically access the Fuji film simulation and it's got this button here for the pop-up flash in the middle where you have the shutter dial on the X-T30 and all the Fuji cameras this is now the function dial so this is where you go if you want to select aperture priority if you want to select video and if you want or if you want to go to any of the custom functions and what was the exposure compensation dial here well it kind of still is the exposure compensation but it doesn't work it's not marked like that and it doesn't always work it it has different functions what Fuji have done with this is they've combined the exposure compensation dial and this dial on the back of the X-T30 they've basically combined them into one dial so when you're shooting in any auto mode like aperture priority or shutter priority then this dial here basically is the exposure compensation and the shutter is controlled by this dial on the front but when you're shooting in manual then this now controls the shutter speed I'm not quite sure whether I've done that for me it's a little bit confusing to have the shutter speed move from one dial to the other depending on whether I'm shooting manually or auto that's going to take a little while to get used to now when you're shooting in shutter priority mode or in manual mode it's kind of like being in the T mode with the T setting here on the X-T30 in that the shutter speed goes all the way up to 15 minutes at one stop increments and that's something that I quite like particularly if you're doing long exposures because I do a lot of exposures that are above 30 seconds at a one minute or two minutes and on most cameras that kind of tops out at 30 seconds and then you have to go to bulb but here you can do an exposure of up to 15 minutes just from using the shutter speed dial now for access to the ISO controls there is no ISO dial like in the X-T4 that's the same as the X-T30 which didn't have a dedicated ISO dial what I used to do was click it let's put it on click on this button and select the ISO using that this does have a dedicated ISO button here which you press this and then it works in combination with the joystick at the back just to select the ISO now again this took me a little while to get used to and I found myself accidentally pressing the Q button too many times and I wanted to change the ISO but again that's just muscle memory it does make sense it's a logical layout but it just is something that took me a while to get used to now another thing that's moved is the bracketing button which again is a function that I use a lot as a landscape photographer that used to be on the function dial here if you wanted bracketing it's now on the on the delete button so you press this here to move it to go into the bracketing menu notice camera is very clearly pitched as a video camera video access to video is relatively simple it doesn't have the the switch the lever to shoot between video mode and still photography mode which the X-T4 has which is something that I do like a lot I like to be able to switch the camera between those two modes it has the um the video mode on the um on the function dial here the same as the X-T30 when you switch when you put this into video mode then all of the controls and the camera work manually in video however if you're in photography mode if you're shooting still still photos you do have this red button on the top which you can hit and the camera will start recording video automatically now when you do this you don't get manual control of the video functions what it's going to do is shoot in full or shoot video in full auto mode so the ISO is going to be auto the shutter speed and the aperture is going to be auto but it does give you that option to be able to shoot video very quickly now if you have the camera in video mode if you want to shoot between auto exposure and manual exposure controls then what you have to do is press the Q button and that gives you access to be able to change between manual and automatic settings and one of the quirky things that I found is that when you're shooting video if you want to change aperture it's done with this dial on the front not with the dial on the lens now again I think that's because Fuji envision people shooting with this one-handed and they want people to be able to change it with their with their finger rather than having to hold it with the second hand not sure maybe it's because of that I really don't know now after using this for a few days it does start to feel quite intuitive it feels very good in the hand it does feel very easy to be shooting stills to be shooting video to switch between the two I've got a bit of a problem with the layout of some of these buttons on the top here I've accidentally started recording quite a few times when I've just been wanting to use the ISO or the Q button and I do think that these buttons could be laid out better perhaps with some of them placed on the back here but that's just something that probably I've got to get used to and give it a give it a few more days and I'll be I'll be I'll stop recording when I don't want to be recording video another significant difference that you'll notice between the controls of the camera is that there's no button here to change between the focus modes whereas on all the other systems you've got the you've got the dial here which gives you manual continuous or single focus that's not here if you want to change focus modes you actually have to go into the menu and do it there I think the main feature of this camera and probably the reason for its existence is the image stabilization in a smaller body Fuji came quite late to the game with image stabilization the first camera that had it was the X-H1 which was a very big camera almost DSLR size camera then they then they used it in the X-T4 which I thought was a much better much smaller much more practical implementation of image stabilization and now this which is not really that much bigger than the X-T20 X-T30 you do lose as I said half a stop of of image stabilization but six stops is still really impressive the other the other payoff again as I said earlier is that because it still has a smaller battery the image stabilization does affect battery life and battery life isn't as good as the X-T30 or anywhere near as good as the 500 to 600 shots that you get on the X-T4 but is it worth it now six stops of image stabilization what does it actually mean so let's have a look at this test or whether still photograph this is shot at 55 millimeters and the golden rule for camera shake is that you should always the shutter time should always double the focal length of the camera so this is shot at 55 millimeters so I should be looking at something like 110 but let's say 1 over 125 for my shutter speed now six stops lower than six stops slower than that is actually about half a second which is quite a long time to be hand holding a camera at 55 millimeters which is about 82 and 82 millimeters on a full frame equivalent so this is a shot this is shot handheld for half a second and you can see here it really it's not perfect there's a little bit of shake there but it really is good so that's the image stabilization doing its job and I think with video image stabilization really comes into its own it allows you to do a lot more shots without having to set up a tripod keeping the camera steady keeping the image steady it just means that you can shoot much more quickly and much more easily on the go so again this is at 55 millimeters and the longer the focal length the more any shake is magnified down the lens so you can see here this is what it looks like handheld with image stabilization on and this is what it looks like with image stabilization off now I'm shooting handheld a lot more often both in my still photography all of these images were shot handheld I shoot I tend to shoot a lot of panoramas handheld because I'm out hiking a lot sometimes when the light's changing very quickly I don't have time to stop and set up the tripod and I tend to shoot handheld and I'm also shooting a lot more video handheld and just to be able to shoot b-roll very quickly on the go without having to set up a tripod without having to take my time image stabilization really does help for that so for me I wouldn't call it a a deal breaker but it is a game changer if that makes sense all right now let's have a look at the image quality that you can expect from the X-S10 now I'm going to do this in Lightroom because it's a software that I use most often you can get slightly more detail right out of the camera if you're using Capture One Pro but generally I use Lightroom for most of my work I just find it a lot more intuitive a lot faster to use and I think it's a software that most people use so that's what I'm going to use for to analyze the files now the camera as I said before has exactly the same sensor as the X-T4, the X-T3, the X-T30 and the X-Pro3 so you're going to get exactly the same image quality from this camera as you would do from any of those cameras now when I'm looking at the image quality here there's nothing scientific about this there's nothing particularly measured they're basically just some shots that I've done when I've been out in the field and the thing that interests me when I look at image quality is how does the camera perform in the field I'm not really interested in resolution charts and things like that I just basically want to know is do I get good enough and sharp enough results from my work so this is the first image now I chose to do an image I wanted to do one with lots of foliage and lots of detail so you could get an idea of how much detail the sensor can render this is shot with the X-T4 and you can see here that that camera handles all this detail in the leaves around here and in this area very well it really is capable of pulling out a lot of detail this it's the same lens but this shot doesn't have anything like the same level of detail before but again you can see how sharp it is there's a lack of noise generally I don't really have any problem with noise with Fuji cameras now this next image is taken at ISO 1000 I wanted to give an example of what you could expect when you're shooting with high ISO and now as again you can see here that the detail the contrast is really nice even at ISO 1000 I've shot with them with other Fuji cameras since the X-T2 up to ISO 2500 ISO 3200 when I'm shooting astro shots or when I'm shooting the aurora and I've always been very happy with the results generally with high ISO it's when you start to push out the shadows that you start to see a degradation of the image and while you can see a little bit here in the shadows over here on the back of the tree it's starting to look a little bit washed out generally the performance is still really nice it's still really contrast even with the shadows pushed up quite a lot now this next image this is really just to give an example of the dynamic range you can see here that the highlights are clipping and that it's got a lot of shadow so let's just have a look what happens when we when we pull down the highlights and when we pull out the shadows a little bit a little bit more just to see and you can see here just I mean it's it's really no great image but you can see here that the highlight recovery is very good the shadow recovery there's plenty of detail here it's not washed out at all we don't lose contrast we don't lose color and I've been very happy with the dynamic range of the Fuji cameras obviously I bracket when I'm when I'm doing some shots if you're looking straight into the light you have to bracket when you're shooting at sunrise or sunset with pretty much any camera but overall the dynamic range performance is really nice now those previous images hadn't been edited at all they were straight out of the camera but this is just an example of a few edited images this is one that I shot the other night it's a long exposure of about two minutes and because I haven't had a lot of opportunity to use the X-S10 shooting landscapes because I've been under lockdown here in Portugal for the last few weeks this is an image taken with the X-T4 which again has exactly the same sensor exactly the same image performance so this is an image shot with the X-T4 and this has been processed again you can zoom in here and you can see the kind of detail that the camera is capable of producing and this is just to give an example with another lens this is with the 55-200mm let's just zoom in and look at the detail here in the mountain face or if we go down to the Alpe d'Azuz you can see the detail in these huts and the trees here and just overall the image quality is exceptional on the camera it's more than good enough for my purposes I've been using Fuji cameras for five years and pretty much since the X-T2 I've always been really really satisfied with the level of detail the level of resolution the noise performance high ISO performance and the dynamic range now when it comes to video this is clearly what the X-S10 has been designed around and as such you'd expect it to stand out so like the X-T4 and the X-T30 you get 10 bit recording and like the X-T4 you get 4k video up to 30 frames per second for 30 minutes which is considerably longer than the X-T30 which tops out at 10 minutes unlike the X-T4 though it won't shoot 4k at 60 frames per second and like the X-T30 it will only transfer at 100 mbs at 4k with 200 mbs at full hd full hd recording is up to 30 minutes the same as the X-T4 and double the 50 minutes of the X-T30 you also get high speed recording at full hd of 240 frames per second which gives you 8x slow motion as well as 120 frames per second which is the fastest that you can get on the X-T30 now of course the camera shoots in f-log which is like a raw photograph it gives you a flat file with all of the image data which makes it a lot easier when it comes to color grading to get a look that's consistent with video that you've shot on other devices like a drone for example and of course you've got all the regular fuji film simulations like the Provia which is the standard you've got the super saturated velvia that's really really strong with the colors classic chrome which is really nice which is desaturated slightly faded look eterna which is a more faded for a really cinematic look you've got the eterna bleach bypass which is a high contrast desaturated look and then across which is a high contrast black and white the stabilization really comes into its own when you're shooting the video and while it doesn't replace a gimbal if you're shooting handheld it does make vlogging and doing handheld shots for b-roll a lot smoother and overall then it's just a great video camera with a fantastic range of options which makes it perfect for small film projects it's quick and easy to start shooting with it's a pleasure to use the really big grip feels great for handholding and the output is just excellent so to conclude then well it's different it's different from any of the other cameras in the fuji x lineup and i must admit that i really do like the retro styling and the and the analog controls on the other fuji cameras it's it's something that i find intuitive and more than that a pleasure to use fuji cameras were one of the reasons why i fell in love with photography again about five years ago so i do miss that it doesn't have weather sealing now i don't know about weather sealing i've been using the fuji system for about five years and i've used the and i've used them in horrific conditions in snow in rain in dust likewise the lenses that i use the 55-200 the 10-24 are not weather sealed lenses and i've never really had that much of a problem with the lack of weather sealing this camera the build quality feels very similar to the xt30 maybe a little bit more plasticky around the dials it's hard to say and i can't speak to the long-term effect of it in the long-term usage of it in terms of weather sealing but i can say that with other fuji cameras i've never really had any problem with the build quality with how tough they are whether they've had weather sealing or not so for me personally i still haven't decided yet whether i'm going to use this or my or continue using the xt3 as my second camera body i must admit i'm still really attached to the everything about the xt3 to the way that it feels to weather to the way that it handles however the image stabilization on this is a big plus point likewise if you're coming from the xt20 or the xt30 this is going to feel like a very different camera it's a very different feels very different in the hand and as i've said the controls are very different so it's going to really come down to how much you use ibis or how much you shoot video if you're just a still photographer you're not going to notice any difference whatsoever in the quality of the images that you get from this however if you shoot a lot handheld if you're shooting sports if you're shooting theaters or concerts or venues things like that then the image stabilization is going to help a lot likewise with things like weddings if you shoot a lot of video then it probably is worth upgrading from the xt30 to this if you don't mind losing the retro controls it has a lot better video functions and the longer shooting time in 4k and the image stabilization really does make a lot of difference in handheld shooting along with a much bigger grip and if you're new to fuji and have never used one of their cameras before then you're probably not going to be as attached to the retro styling and to the analog dials as i am and in that case it's well worth looking at this camera particularly if you're looking for a camera to get started in filmmaking to get started in making vlogs or in my case if you're looking for a secondary camera to complement a camera that you already use for shooting films or photography this has excellent still image quality it has excellent video quality and a really wide range of video functions and the image stabilization make it incredibly useful for all kinds of handheld shooting it's comfortable to use the grip feels really great in the hand and overall it's just an excellent camera and well worth taking a look at so i think that's everything for this video i hope it's been useful and i hope it's been informative if you've got any questions at all just drop me a comment or question in the box below or send me an email at this point i'd really like to say thanks to the guys at moment in the us who sent me this camera for review and have been incredibly supportive and helpful in getting it to me so thanks to them if you're looking to buy camera gear or video gear online check them out they've got an incredibly good range of stock and really really good customer service they're great guys over there so big thumbs up to them big thanks to them and basically that's everything so as ever thanks for watching good luck with your shooting and take care