Fuji 100-400mm OIS f/4.5~5.6 XF WR review for shooting action

Introduction Shooting sports and other fast action is probably the last application for which it is clear that DSLR's are still outperforming mirrorless camera. There are several reasons for this, most are objective limitations that mirrorless need to overcome:

The best phase detection AF outperforms on sensor phase detection or contrast detection in mirrorless cameras. This is especially acute in low light.

Brightness of an optical viewfinder is superior in bright light to that of electronic viewfinder. Also EVF blackout seems to be longer than that of OVF.

Professional supper-telephoto lenses are largely missing from most mirrorless systems. Micro four thirds (MFT) is doing better than other systems, but they also have a single 300mm lens (600mm equivalent) when it comes to super telephoto lenses.

Given these limitation it is not surprising that today something like Nikon full frame DSLR with fixed focal length 300mm lens provide a better experience than any mirrorless systems.  But I do not shoot sports for living, and do not shoot sports all that often. A while back I switched to mirrorless only systems. They are fantastic alternative to baulky DSLRs for general photography. Even when shooting sports there are some possible advantages in using mirrorless:

Compactness of a system is a virtue in itself, which allows one to bring more lenses, pack lighter, go further. Even with one lens weight matters – if you have shot a whole day event, such as surfing competition, you can appreciate why this is relevant.

It is easier to achieve a higher frame rate without mirror flapping up and down.

It is easier to switch to shooting video at will.

On top of that mirrorless have been making impressive gains with respect to EVF quality and AF performance. Based on the existing information, I would guess that Sony A6300 and A6500 are the current leaders when paired with the right lens. Unfortunately, Sony system is not the most exciting one when it comes to the lens selection. This is why I user MFT and Fuji. Out of MFT I use Panasonic GX8, and out of telephoto lenses I have both Olympus 40-150mm F2.8 and Leica 100-400mm lenses. This is what I have been using for the last several action shoots. The system did pretty well, though tracking object in bright daylight with EVF has been a challenge.

At the same time MTF is still noticeably limiting compared to Fuji APS-C sensor in terms of dynamic range and low light performance. Hence, I was excited to hear about the firmware updates for Fuji and to test it with the new 100-400mm lens. I headed south to Santa Cruz my X-Pro2 and Fuji 100-400mm for a test run.

Testing with X-Pro2 vs X-T2 As I mentioned, I was using Fuji X-Pro2 for this test. While it is one of the two latest flagship cameras, X-Pro2 is the wrong flagship for this type of shooting – the correct one being X-T2, which I do not have. X-Pro2 and X-T2 share many elements – same sensor, same focusing software so there is no reason to expect that one would be light years away from another; but they are not exactly identical.

X-T2 notably has slightly different firmware that allows one to select shooting scenario – which informs the camera about expected subject behavior – will the subject pop-out suddenly, or if subject will gradually move through the frame, etc. I do not know to what degree this setting will impact auto focus performance, but I cannot discount that it may.

X-T2 can also be operated with the optional grip. It is not just a holding convenience – having two batteries this grip provides option to operate camera in "high performance" mode. This increases how quickly batteries will drain, but also increases frame rate making it easier to track subject through the EVF, and allegedly also increases AF performance.

My expectation is that X-T2 should prove to be a superior option. But it is hard for me to say to what degree. Though some people have strong opinions about EVF being in the corner vs the center, I do not believe this makes a difference. 

There is one way in which X-Pro2 may be superior to X-T2 – this is the option to use X-Pro2's optical view finder. Theoretically rangefinder-style OVF is superiors in two ways to even optical through the lens (TTL) viewfinder: first, there is no blackout of any kind during exposure; second, is that being able to see outside of the frame lines allows one to survey larger area and get camera on target faster.

The practical side of using X-Pro2 OVF is a bit more tricky. Since OVF in X-Pro2 is not TTL, as such it is not able to provide reasonable preview experience for a long telephoto lens. It is designed to cover the range from 16mm-150mm, with 150mm is already being a small section of the viewfinder that is used for framing. After 150mm the line indicating framing turns red and does not get any smaller, basica lly leaving one to guess what is the actual fraction of the view that will be captured.

At this point someone may recall that starting with X100T Fuji OVFs introduced digital tab. This is a section of OVF that projects (picture-in-picture style) EVF view of the scene. It is a good feature for manual focusing and some other application. Unfortunately, this mode cannot be activated when focusing mode is set to zone focus. At the same time zone focus is the mode that is recommended and performs the best when tracking moving subjects.

So while OVF performs great with 50-140mm lens, it is much more difficult to use with 100-400mm, and even more so with 100-400mm + teleconverter.

Physical characteristics Fuji adopted philosophy, similar to that of Olympus – if one wants high quality then be willing to pay and deal with the weight. This approach is apparent with Fuji 16-50mm, 50-140mm, 90mm as well as 100-400mm – those are big and weighty lenses. All of them are well built and environmentally sealed. This is not the kind of lens that you stick in a bag just in case. Weight wise Fuji is just over 3 lb, which makes it is actually heavier than the full frame Nikon 80-400mm DSLR lens. Fuji is also wider and significantly longer. Given the size it does look a bit odd on comparatively compact, and rangefinder styled X-Pro2.

In terms of physical controls it has the usual combination of controls common to Fuji lenses and supper-telephoto. For instance, as a Fuji lens it has Automatic aperture vs Manual aperture switch. As a supper telephoto it has focusing distance limit switch, which stops camera from trying to focus on subjects closer than 5 meters away. Given the weight of the lens it is not surprising that zoom bezel requires some force to operate. Perhaps a touch more than I would like, given that rapid changes of focal length are common when shooting fast moving sports, especially with several subjects different distances away. Lens performance One aspect I will not cover extensively here is the optical performance of the lens. By all accounts the lens is a good performer and that was also my impression. Unfortunately, given that I was mainly planning to use the lens for sports photography other aspects of the lens seemed more interesting for me to explicitly test – namely its focusing performance with my Fuji camera.

I will preface this section with saying that historically Fuji has not been the leader when it came to focusing performance, both in terms of speed and accuracy. While being well recognized for its image quality and lens line-up among APS-C sensor cameras, Fuji usually was not seriously considered for action shooting, or video for that mater – both being closely correlated based on the quality and processing of live feed. As of recent Fuji decided to close this gap and claimed to significantly improve both.

In low light I was not too impressed with X-Pro2 performance, even after the September 2016 firmware update. Its continuous focusing could not hold its own against likes of Panasonic, which is one of the front runners among mirrorless when it comes to low light focusing performance.

But low light focusing is quite a bit different from daylight focusing. The main reason for this is that many mirrorless cameras these days are using on sensor phase detection. This method introduces a number of small spit prism elements built into the sensor. Because they are small their effectiveness is minimal in noisy low light feed. So when operating in low light phase detection based cameras switch to usual contrast detection, which makes them generally slow. Based on the technology choices Panasonic does not have this dual system method, but this is outside of scope of this review.

At the same time it is pretty clear that 100-400mm is not a lens for low light. Hence X-Pro2 performance in low light is more relevant to 50-140mm, but not too much to 100-400mm. So I headed in reasonably bright day to Santa Cruz to see how well it does with one of my favorite subjects – surfers.

I was very pleasantly surprised how well auto-focusing has performed. During the entire time AF was set into continuous mode, and focusing was set to "zone" mode where it selects a set of specific points from a highlighted region. Zone focusing is what Fuji claims is the mode one should be using for fast moving object. While experience was not as good as Nikon DSLR, because of both difficulty tracking subject and AF accuracy, but it was not bad at all. In fact I would say that overall focusing was pretty reliable. I can use specific points of reference there. Nikon D700 in my experience would produce more focusing errors when paired with Tamron 200-500mm. Those errors where very significant, clear inability to track fast moving object. Panasonic GX8 with Leica 100-400mm also seemed to be less reliable. In case of Leica camera seemed to be able to respond fast enough, but while it was close, in noticeable number of instance it was not close enough when reviewing results on a monitor. Comparing those three is not exactly trivial. Error that would result in image being noticeably out of focus with full frame (D700) may be completely acceptable with MTF camera (GX8), Fuji X-Pro2 being in between those two. At the same time Leica is longer in 35mm equivalent terms at telephoto end – 800mm, and it is also not as bright, being F6.3. So worse performance may have an explanation. Of course, if you switch to a latest high end DSLR, such as Nikon D810, and pair it will a fixed focal length telephoto lens, such as Nikon 300mm F4 PF, results will be better than what one can expect from Fuji.

So in short I felt that the improvement was impressive! Focusing performance was such that only about 20 images out of 1,500 were unusably out of focus. This is a very reasonable keeper ratio. Most of my experiments using OVF at 500-600mm end ended up a failure being hopelessly miss-framed. But framing with EVF was not all that bad. While falling short of what one can get with a DSLR it was not crippling at least for the bar that I have. I am sure professional surfing photographer would laugh at this, but I am not in the same category.

Conclusion While shooting with EVF may not be the same as shooting with a DSLR for a very long time, Fuji is making reasonable strides to catch-up with the leaders of the mirrorless pack.

The big and bulky 100-400mm actually delivers when paired with the latest Fuji bodies. Overall I think performance of the lens is impressive enough. While it may not satisfy a pro user, it is a great lens for an occasional supper telephoto user. 

Source: Fuji 100-400mm OIS f/4.5~5.6 XF WR review for shooting action