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REVIEW X-H1 & MKX LENSES
than ugly blooms.
nice, out-of-focus highlights. Cine lenses are designed for very little focus breathing or changing of viewpoint as you zoom in, and the MKX lenses control this very well – certainly a different league to photo lenses. As the MKX optics are all manual, they have precise and smooth focus rings, with a very long throw that makes them extremely accurate. They also have standard-sized gearing to make them easy to fit to focusing rigs. The X-H1 does offer focus peaking, but the peaking can be a little hard to see in bright sunlight so an external monitor is a good idea, and boosts the files from 4:2:0 to 4:2:2 quality (still in eight-bit, though).
The zoom rings are smooth to use and the clickless aperture ring has a large throw to enable very precise fine- tuning. There are no zebra patterns in the camera, so it’s another area where an external monitor could help. This would be via the micro HDMI cable, which can be fragile so it’s best to use a cage with a cable support. Both lenses deliver highly-detailed footage that’s crisp with natural colours. Even wide open at 18mm the corners are sharp, which could potentially be down to Fujifilm’s software communicating with your editing programme. From both lenses, the sharpness is good right across the frame at every focal length and aperture, albeit marginally sharper in the centre, of course. There is very little chromatic aberration and flare is well controlled, especially with the lens hood in place. If you provoke flare, it gives a pleasing effect rather
BELOW The X-H1 can shoot DCI 4K to an internal SD memory card at up to 200 Mbps in F-log, but only at 24 or 23.98.
If you use stills-style lenses on the X-H1 then you can use the rear touchscreen for focus pulls, but you lose the handling benefits and lack of breathing of the cine glass. The most important part for filmmakers is what the footage looks like and here, the X-H1 delivers brilliantly. Especially in 4K and 200Mbps, the images are very detailed and there is a claimed 12 stops of dynamic range, which seems about right, although there is some rolling shutter if you provoke the camera. Many will never notice it, though. Dropping the quality and bit rate saves on memory space and opens up more frame rate options, and does not hugely affect image quality. It’s always good to record at the highest resolutions, though, which means you can crop in if you’re outputting in HD. At ISO values up to around 5000,
THE X-H1 DOES OFFER FOCUS PEAKING, BUT IT CAN BE A LITTLE HARD TO SEE IN BRIGHT SUNLIGHT
DEFINITION AUGUST 2018
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